Francis Fukuyama may be the most influential—and misunderstood—political scientist alive. He’s remembered for predicting “The End of History” as liberal democracy triumphs over its rivals. What’s forgotten is his warning: that democracy could still collapse from the inside, as a restless populace (“The Last Man”) turns to nihilistic self-destruction.

Three decades later, Fukuyama has written a memoir to reckon with his legacy and peer into the future once more. He joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to discuss how Plato explains Trump, whether China’s model will endure, and how AI could make “the end of history go out the window.”

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Jon Bateman: Francis Fukuyama, Frank, welcome to the World Unpacked.

Francis Fukuyama: Thanks for having me.

Jon Bateman: Well, thanks for being here. You know, I asked Carl this morning with no prompting about who I am or the interview that we were to be doing today, who is the most prominent living political scientist? And it named you.

Francis Fukuyama: So there is a lot of part of our plot and I are friends, so I'm not surprised

Jon Bateman: I really want to get into that because AI is one of the big forces that is changing our world. You are a user of it and an analyst of it. But we have so much to talk about today. I want to talk to about the state of international politics, the state domestic politics. We're here in Donald Trump's second term. We just had a massive midterm election which will define what will happen in the next few years. There's a technological revolution underway. But before we get into all of that, you have just come out with a new book in the realm of The Last Man. Why don't we just start there? This is a memoir, as you title it. It's a mixture of personal recollections, storytelling, family history, and the big ideas that you've been wrestling with throughout your career. Why a memoir?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, there were some things I wanted to clarify. So ever since I wrote the original end of history essay, I would say that, you know, several times a week I get somebody in a comment on something saying, oh, I thought it was the end of the history, Mr. End of History, what about this? I've tried to explain this multiple times over the years and I figured I would try to do it once and for all in the memoir too. Explain what I meant by that. The other thing, however, is that there's a kind of... Evolution of my thought that has led me to what I'm currently focused on, which is actually the American bureaucracy and the importance of bureaucracy in general. And I don't think I ever made it clear how I arrived at that point and why I think that's the case. And there are other issues about things I've thought about that I've never written them up in a book. So I figured it would be good to just. Get that out and explain to people, you know, why I think the things I do.

Jon Bateman: The loose structure of the book makes it very readable, actually. It's a collection of vignettes of kind of things that you've experienced, witnessed, people that you have known interwoven with your own personal intellectual revolution, which I think has a lot to say about the times that we're living in. But let's just start with why you wrote the book, which is the idea of the end of history. The phrase with which you are, for good or for ill, immortally associated with, has long been misunderstood. So here we are, what is the end of history? Let's clarify it once and for all.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, the end of history was not my phrase, it was that of the philosopher Hegel, who wrote in the early 18th, 19th century that, you know, history was progressive. And I think that actually most people, whether they admit it or not believe some version of it, you know, we call this process today development or modernization, and believe that modern societies are, you know, very different from pre-modern ones. And the question of the end of history uses end in the sense of direction or objective. And so if history and societies are progressive, where is that progress heading? Where is it pointing to? What kind of society lies at the end that? Now, for many decades, the Marxists accepted this Hegelian notion of historical progress, but they said that the true end of history would not be a liberal state, but would be a communist utopia. And, you know, what I observed at the end, towards the end of the 1980s, was that they weren't ever going to get there. And that if there was a termination point to this process, it was going to be something like liberal democracy tied to a market economy. I didn't say that I knew this. I didn't say that I was sure that there would be nothing further, but I did not see any. Superior form of civilization out there that anyone was backing once communism had been taken off the board. And so that was the, you know, that was, the essence of that argument. What people did not recognize was that the title of my 1992 book was The End of History and The Last Man. They didn't read the last five chapters of that book, which were the chapters on The Last man. And in them, I talked about a lot of reasons why liberal democracy may break down in the future. So for those who thought that this was just a naive triumphalism, that everything would be great from now on, we'd all be living in democracies, you know, just wasn't, well, I think they only read the title.

Jon Bateman: You know, yeah Yeah, it's an interesting through line that I got from your latest book as well that on the one hand, you're a real committed soldier on behalf of liberalism, the political philosophy of the rule of law, somewhat limited government, tolerance and the like. You have sought to defend and promote this against different internal and external forces in your career, I think you can you can tell me if that's not right, right? But on the other hand in the last man piece, which we'll get into, and which is a huge subject of your new book, you point to the internal contradictions of liberalism and its potential weaknesses and paradoxes that could cause it to break down, which is precisely what we're seeing today. So it is a kind of a mixed relationship that you have with this huge idea. Is that maybe why you've been misunderstood?

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, well, people don't like subtlety and complicated stories, but yeah, I mean, I think that the general argument about why we are living in a liberal democracy, you know, continues to be valid. I mean the idea that we do have this succession, by the way, I really rewrote the end of in this two-volume series I did. More than 10 years ago on the origins of political order, where I corrected some of the things that I didn't understand when I wrote the original book. But I think that, yeah, it's correct that if you take a sufficiently long view of human affairs, you do see that there is a progressive pattern in it, which is really marked by the difference between living in a poor, underdeveloped country and living in Europe or the United States or Japan, Korea. You know, a modern society and that that was really the, you know the subject, you know how did we get here? Where was it going? But also, you what were some of the, well, you there's two types of problems. So one of them I would say is extrinsic, you know that a country can get hit by a pandemic, it can get by an earthquake, a lot of things, bad things can happen. That's not related to the nature of the political system governing it. The much more interesting and profound question is whether as a governing system, it's really sustainable or whether it has internal contradictions that will eventually cause it to be replaced by something else. And that's really the issue that I was trying to explore both in the last man chapters of the original book and also in this memoir.

Jon Bateman: So before we get to those internal contradictions, which have some, you go in some surprising places there. You go back to Plato, you look at the spiritual and emotional essence of human nature. But before we got to that, maybe we could just get your assessment of the end of history thesis as it stands right now. So you wrote this essay and then the book around the end the Cold War seemed very prescient. And now today. There really aren't any communist countries left standing other than perhaps Cuba, which is on its last legs and is no one's idea of a paragon. China is more of a state capitalist kind of hybrid at this point. So is that how you see the world that it's been kind of, that market capitalism has indeed sort of pervaded and then become the victim of its own success? Do you see any compelling alternatives out?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, that's the question I've been raising for the last 35 years, you know, that if you challenge the hypothesis, what system do you see that pretends that it's going to be superior in the way that communism said it was gonna be superior? And I have to say that I don't see one. The only country I think that has a alternative, a real alternative is China, where you have this mixture of... A semi-market economy tied to an authoritarian political system. And that is a real alternative. I don't think the Chinese model can be replicated in many other societies other than China. And I think it's also got some long-term downsides. And I it remains to be seen whether in another 30 years it will look to be as successful as it appears to be now. But that's really the question I was trying to engage in, whether there are systematic alternatives to liberal democracy that people thought were plausible and in the real world were actually successful.

Jon Bateman: Say more about your assessment of the Chinese system, because it's not uncommon today for people to look at the United States as kind of in decline, decadent, torn apart by its internal contradictions and tensions. And then on the other hand, look at China and think, wow, you know, they are moving to the leading edge of technology. They've lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. They seem reasonably stable for the time being. They got their problems, but many people would say that China could present an alternative and that perhaps in a hundred years it'll appear as though they have more staying power than we did. What's your view on that? Because that that could be

Francis Fukuyama: If that proves to be true, then I'd say, yeah, the end of history is wrong. There is a authoritarian alternative, but I don't think they're actually going to get there because I do think that their system really does have some big problems. And the most fundamental one is even if they are still around and still, you know, reasonably stable and people are being fed and housed and so forth, is that really enough for human beings with no freedom? No ability to actually shape the society that you're living in, no call for individual innovation and any sort of assertion of your human desires. And I think that that's an open question. I'm not sure that people in the long run are gonna be happy living in that kind of society. In a way, that is a... Last man type of society where people don't have the opportunity to really express, you know, higher aspirations. They are fed and clothed and you have this paternalistic big brother taking care of you. But, you, know, is that going to make people happy in the long run? And I'm not really convinced it will.

Jon Bateman: You know, a historian might say people have not had the opportunity to self-express, self-actualize, self-define in those ways for most of human history, right? These are relatively modern attachments. That would be the argument. And so, just as political systems in the past have been sustained largely in other ways, through material comforts, sense of identity, cohesion, and force. Could we not put the genie back in the bottle? Could we not make people lose their attachment to these liberal aspirations?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, you know, one argument in modernization theory is it becomes harder to do that as you become more, as your society gets richer and better educated. You know, that if you're living in a desperately poor country, which most of humanity was for most of human history, your main issue is just getting food on the table for the next day. And if you can succeed in that and survive, you're going to be content. But as you get richer and better educated, you begin to have other kinds of aspirations, right? Like, you know, what's one of the most popular occupations today? It's being an internet influencer, right. How long has that occupation been around in human history? Not very long, right, and so there's a lot of things that in modern societies we, you now, create as aspirations that go well beyond, you know, what traditional societies have offered. And if you say, well, can you put the genie back in the bottle? Well, I'm sure you can get people to not want to be internet influencers, but you know the whole totality of modern society with its freedoms, with the opportunities that it presents, you know are you going to get people to accept a much more limited life than that? Other than by putting them under such a big trauma that they're just glad to be alive at some level. And I don't think so.

Jon Bateman: Well, and to and to your point, China has plenty of Internet influencers, right? They're watched by the state and there's limits on what they can and can't talk about, but it's not like the Chinese model represents a completely Spartan society in which these aspirations just aren't present whatsoever. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to ask you to bring into this conversation this concept of thymus. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Thumos, thank you. I don't have the classical training that you did, which is a fascinating part of your intellectual story, actually not starting out as a political scientist, but starting out in the classics and in comparative literature. Maybe we'll touch on that. But tell us about Thumose and what that has to do with some of the things that we're talking about.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, thumos is a Greek word for pride or spiritedness. And it comes up in the Republic when Socrates asks whether there's not a third part of the soul. There's reason and there's desire. But he says, isn't there a third part of this soul that demands respect or recognition, where we want the approval of other human beings? And I think that this is actually something that economists miss completely, you know, the economic model of a rational utility maximizer, it gets the first two parts, it gets the desire, which we call preferences, and it gets reason, which we called rationality. But economists don't really take account of thumos, or this prideful side of human beings where we actually desire non material things, we desire the approval of other human beings, we desired status. Either absolute or relative. And this really is one of the big drivers. And this is the argument that Hegel made. This is one the drivers of human history, is a struggle for recognition. It may overlap to some extent with material aspiration, but it's different from material aspiration. And a lot of people are willing to sacrifice material value in order to get recognition. And I think it's very much a definite, you know, defining part of modern politics. So if you think about what does a nationalist want, they may be living in modernized societies, but they want the recognition of their ethnic group, their country, their region to be seen as significant and different and of a similar status to other nations in the world. They want their flag in the United Nations. And that, you know, is a driver of a lot of politics. Identity politics is really not so much about resource allocation. It is a struggle over recognition.

Jon Bateman: So, bringing this now to liberalism, United States, China, I think you position this concept of Thumos as both a desire that liberalism can somewhat sate, but then also a problem for liberalism in terms of its ability to fully eradicate these sometimes chaotic impulses and give people an outlet. For an aspect of human nature. Explain that and what that has to do with the last.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, there are two types of thumos. One I call isothumia, which is the desire for equal recognition, and the other is megalothumania, which the desire is for superior recognition. Democracy is essentially about isothamia, right, that people do not want to be seen as inferior to other individuals or groups of people. And the struggle for rights and democracy is really, you know, a struggle for isothermia. So. So, you know, that's kind of the defining principle of a democracy. Everybody may not be substantively equal, but they are equal in terms of the respect that they're given, respect being defined as, you know, being given rights. And so in a liberal democracy, we say, you know, every citizen has, you know, certain basic rights to speech, to thought, to belief, to association, and so forth. And that is really what constitutes the dignity of human beings. The law recognizes our dignity by granting us and protecting those rights. The problem is that some people are not satisfied with equal recognition, but want superior recognition. And that obviously is oftentimes at odds with the equal recognition that's demanded by a liberal democracy. And that is what leads to the potential for instability, domination, hierarchy, as people strive to be better than other people. And every democracy has got to satisfy this division between ISO and megalothymia. And you can't do away with that desire for superior recognition because all human excellence depends on it, whether in sports, in the arts, in politics. If people didn't have any aspiration to be better, you wouldn't have a society that it could actually make progress. And so you need to base the society on isothermia, but you also need to give running room to the good forms of megalothermia and defend yourself from the bad ones. So I... In the original book, I actually talked about Donald Trump back in 1992, and I said, well, one of the advantages of a liberal democracy is that if you have these overweening ambitions, you can go into business and get rich, and that should be enough for you. But I didn't understand that in the end, that wouldn't be enough for someone like Trump who also wanted political power. And, you know, this is where we are. So it shows in a way both the good and the bad sides of this. Aspiration, some superior recognition.

Jon Bateman: It's funny just on Trump, I think maybe a younger generation who only knows him as a politician may not understand what a pervasive cultural figure he was in the 1980s and 1990s, making cameos in movies and constantly being on television and the tabloids. So it's fascinating that you plucked that out as an exemplar of this thesis. And so to take it to the last man, this was your concern in 1992, as I understand it, that liberal capitalism. Will succeed on some level in granting us the basic dignity of citizenry and actually satisfying a lot of our material needs. But then what then? What then in the absence of the opportunity for a heroic struggle, which has been there for many other parts in human history, you know, there's this meme on Twitter, born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore of the stars, something like that, that we're kind of in this. Almost nadir of history in another way in terms of our ability to express these sort of spirited impulses embedded in Thumos. So your prediction as early as 1992 is that this would actually corrode liberal democracy. Why and what were you seeing at that time that gave you this idea?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, for exactly the reasons you outline that people would want to aspire to something more. You know, I had a line in the original book in which I said, if you're living in a successful democracy that was made successful by the victory of, you know, Democrats in an earlier generation. And that's a done deal. That's a one victory. You may want to struggle against democracy and human rights because what you want to do basically as a human being is struggle You don't want to live in a world without aspirations dreams, you know without the opportunity to risk your life for a higher cause and that really is the impulse that would drive, you Know the threat to democracy is people wanting something more wanting struggle for its own sake And I think you see versions of that on both the extreme left and the extreme right in our present-day politics. You have all these characters on January 6 that are dressed up in camo, pretending that they are brave patriots like the Patriots of 1776. Substantively, that was nonsense, but that was what they were aspiring to. And that's why you had the storming of the Capitol, because that was... They were misled by a demigod into thinking that, you know, they could actually be those brave patriots, you know, if only they followed his lead.

Jon Bateman: You're listening to The World Unpacked with John Bateman, where we dive deep into pressing global issues and make sense of the big forces shaping our world. Now, have you learned anything so far that intrigued or surprised you? Let me know in the comments, or just give us a like. And if you wanna hear more of my conversations with the world's most informed and interesting people, you can subscribe right here. Now, back to the show. These people are sometimes derisively called LARPers, live-action role-players, and it's a great description of what you're describing.

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, well, right. And I think that it's abetted by technology, actually, because a lot of these people come out of the video game world, where they can live in a completely parallel universe, a fake parallel universe and imagine themselves to be masters of the universe with all sorts of superhero powers. But it's all basically a lie. But it does feel it does feed this. Desire for greatness that you know certain people feel.

Jon Bateman: I guess a challenge for liberals, I think, is you often seem to be saying, we've got it pretty good. In other words, enjoy what we have. Things are pretty stable. We've got plenty of rights. Politically, bringing this down to small-P politics, the kind of, you know, the grubby everyday politics, you know, we just had a midterm election. That's a hard sell. Actually, it's very easy to run an election on the claim that things are terrible. Something as small as to someone who's doing well off as gas prices. People feel that very acutely. What would be your message to those who say, things are not well. Actually, we need, if not a revolution, some kind of reinvention as a country. And they may not know exactly what this looks like, but they would say they're not just being driven. By Thumos that actually our country is in some form of decaying or crisis conditions for regular people.

Francis Fukuyama: There's a difference between recognizing that there are still uncompleted tasks in your society and that you need to, you know, you need, to attend to them. And that's completely within a liberal consensus. I mean, no liberal would say everything is perfect. You know, we need to reform this institution, that institution. We need to deal with poverty. We need deal with inequality. That's all, I think, taken for granted. But that's different from saying that. The liberal system itself is responsible for these inequalities. And unless you abolish that liberal framework altogether and replace it with something much more radical, you're never gonna solve the problems. In other words, you know, there is a long tradition that I think is intrinsic to liberalism of liberal reformism, but it's not, you know system shattering reform. It's really within the system, you constantly need to improve things because you never really quite make it. So that, of course, I think is something that's always been with us. It's something that's inevitable that people would support. What we're seeing today are people that are saying, no, it's liberalism itself that's the problem. That these problems are intrinsic to liberalism and unless you abolish liberalism in some way, you're never gonna get to the end of these problems.

Jon Bateman: Now, you're not a politician, so I'm not going to hold you to the standard of a politician in kind of creating a coalition or sort of having a message to the public. But I do think it's fair to say that that term you used, liberal reformism, it's got a bad brand nowadays, right? You cannot activate the American people on the notion of kind of modest reform of an overall successful system. What? What do you, what is the solution to that? Because that seems troubling from the perspective of someone who wants to hold on to it.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I am a big fan of the abundance movement, you know Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson I think there's a lot of stuff that we have Been unable to do like building things You know building high-speed rail here in california building adequate housing so that you don't have you know, possibly afford unaffordable Houses in big cities like san francisco or new york And so there is actually a lot of stuff that is not revolutionary, that doesn't overturn the system, but it's still very important. I mean, this was all the stuff that was done during the progressive era and in the New Deal, building new institutions, you know, regulatory institutions, the Hoover Dam, the TVA, the interstate highway system, you know sending a man to the moon in eight years in the 1960s. These were all accomplishments of a liberal society. And we seem to have lost the ability to do even that type of activity collectively in the present era. And I think it does feed a certain kind of populism. I mean, it's not an accident that both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are builders who feel that they've been held back by all of the Lilliputian rules Notice that. Confront anybody that wants to try to build a spaceship company or a big development. And I think that if we could simply get back to a society that actually builds, that would be quite an accomplishment. And it would take away the argument of a lot of populists that say, our society is stuck. We just can't move forward. And we can't accomplish anything anymore.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, even more than Trump the Builder, I would say the Elon Musk phenomenon, the kind of fan base that he's built is so strongly associated with, you could say a form of Thumos, right? The idea that he has a kind of spirit that is more free and energetic than the institutions, the kind decadent society around him and that he inspires us again to go to the stars. And then somehow this all gets enmeshed in a kind of politics of nostalgia, which is part of MAGO.

Francis Fukuyama: Very curious.

Jon Bateman: I don't know what you make

Francis Fukuyama: Mark Andreessen, a couple of years ago, wrote this essay about the risk aversion of modern liberal societies, that they basically just didn't want to do anything that caused the least amount of disturbance. And that was what was holding back technology. And this was all kind of in favor of a much more libertarian approach to things like AI, that we shouldn't scared about that future. We shouldn't be. Trying to limit it. We should just go all out for a technological society of the future. So it is a pretty common attitude in Silicon Valley. I think that my preference would be to harness some of that ambition and actually be able to do things, but be aware that there are some actual risks involved in all of that. I remember, this was a little bit before my time, but at the dawn of the nuclear era, there was this acute awareness that this was very powerful technology. It would change the world. But you had to be careful about it because it was precisely because it so powerful. And so I do think that there's a sweet spot where you can aspire to the promise of technological change without being blind to the, you know, the evident. You know, potential unintended consequences of it.

Jon Bateman: So where, let me ask the AI question this way. Are you more hopeful or more fearful that we can chart a course where AI helps restore these values versus threatening them? Because I'll offer kind of, if I could, on the one hand, people in Silicon Valley building these tools, they really style themselves as the builders, the frontiersmen of today, the ones who are creating the abundant utopian future. On the other hand, I'm not sure that they're liberals actually and I'm not sure they believe that they are bringing us into a world of human freedom.

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, well, you have had the revival of a kind of libertarian. It's not a kind of principal defense of inequality. But I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley say, yeah, actually the smart people that build this technology should have more political power than people that don't do this sort of thing. So you're introducing a kind of deeply in egalitarian, you know, strand into the. The thought of theirs. And I think that it also produces some very weird quasi religious offshoots like successor technology or successor generation that will actually merge human beings with machines and make beings that are better than current human beings. Oh, you know, this is right.

Jon Bateman: Or maybe the machines will simply replace us and and that that was something to to to look forward to

Francis Fukuyama: That's the post-human future. By the way, Elon Musk is one of the believers in this. I think that's what's actually motivating him to push for some of the technologies like Neuralink that he's been a big proponent of. Life extension is also part of this agenda. And I think while I celebrate and wreck, well, I mean, I guess this gets back to the last man issue. So. I recognize that people do not want to be the last man. They really do wanna have aspirations and I think there's some real problems that could be solved by technology. Among them, the problems created by technology itself really need technology to solve. But I think that blindly accepting this kind of the future without any recognition of the potential dangers and the needs to actually exert human control over this process is just foolish. So again I take a kind of intermediate position where I see where it's coming from but I also think that you know we need to be careful.

Jon Bateman: I've found that in these AI discussions, before we can really explore the politics of AI and its impact on the future global and political order, we almost just have to lay down our assumptions about where this technology is headed. You. I think are, maybe I should just ask you, where do you see this technology headed? There are those today that believe that we're just a few years away from a kind of technological singularity that will so radically increase the pace of scientific and technological and engineering progress and so radically alter the economy due to the new abundance of cognitive resources. That the future economy society and politics will be essentially unrecognizable and then we can debate kind of what form that would take or what form we would like it to take, but do you believe that the technology will be as transformative?

Francis Fukuyama: I think it will be transformative, but not quite in the way that, you know, a lot of those people believe. I think actually the adoption and use of AI in the economy is a long, slow process. And there, I think, it's not going to be different from earlier technological revolutions because you actually have to deal with a lot of real world constraints on the way the technology is used. So, I think, for example, that... Probably in 10 to 15 years, people will not be driving their own cars. I think that self-driving cars really are good enough that, you know, people do not have to own a car themselves necessarily. They could simply call, you know, Waymo or whatnot and get around. There'll be all sorts of advantages to this. It'll save us a lot of money because there's a huge number of traffic deaths and accidents that cost a lot of money to. You know, take care of that we won't have to deal with in this kind of a self-driving car future. But, you know look at how long it's taken us already, you know to deploy this technology and to imagine a future in which it's basically the primary mode of transportation in most American cities, I think is still gonna be quite a ways off, even though the technology exists today, you know it could be rolled out, you now this year. But it's not going to be because people have to adjust a whole bunch of habits that they've got in order to really make the technology work for them. So I think it is gonna lead to this abundant future, but especially if it actually does lead to that abundant future that in itself is a potential danger because precisely because of the ability of AI to substitute for human labor or human work. Human work is important not just because it provides an income, food on the table, shelter. It is important for one's internal sense of self-worth. If you have a job, it means that somebody believes that you are doing something useful for the society such that they're willing to pay you real resources for doing it. And to the extent that these occupations are eliminated by machines, it's not going to. Be something that you can solve by universal basic income, by just giving people handouts. Because a handout does not make you proud of yourself. It does not give meaning to your life. You know, it basically just keeps you alive. And I think that that's really the challenge of AI is to... Create a world in which humans still add value that is uniquely human. And I'm not quite sure what the path to that is because this is a general purpose technology that really substitutes for a whole lot of things that human beings currently do.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, I think that's right. You know, I posed the question to you in terms of, you know, the near future, but I think you're right that the question of timelines is often where the debate is, but actually even people who are more skeptical about timelines, if they've thought seriously about it, still will often grant that over some period of time, these transformations will take place. And so then what is the solution? So some people who believe that we're headed toward an AI dominated future, but they have a hopeful tale. They'll say, don't worry because we will all be artists and crafts people. Frank, in your book, you talk about your woodworking and how much meaning it has offered your life. Is that a solution?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, just as a practical observation, so LLMs and current generation artificial intelligence technology is really good for cognitive work. Anything that can be done behind a computer screen, these machines can probably do better than a human being. What they're not so good at is actually manipulating the physical world. And I think that that's one of the things that's actually gonna slow down the deployment of this technology. Robotics is way behind, you know, LLMs in terms of ability to actually interact with real world things. So that's just one consideration that means that I think the real world stuff is gonna take longer. It's going to have this interesting effect that it's going hurt. People that are more educated that work with their minds before it hurts working class people, plumbers and electricians that actually have to deal with material objects and move atoms around as opposed to just, you know, electrons zipping around a processor. So those are going to be challenges that we're gonna have to deal with. And then the question comes of control, which I think is really the issue that has dominated the discussion about AI since the summer, since the hugging face incident, where... And people in this field have argued this for some time. It's not clear that we can really control these machines. In my book, I just have one very short chapter on AI where I talk about agentic AI being the big problem with this technology where we will delegate to a machine responsibility and authority that we would normally delegate to a human being. People are already doing it. I just signed up for my Muse account run. Meta so it can pay my bills, you know for me regularly but given our experience with human delegation and human organizations seems to me inevitably we're going to have big problems in this area because You know the agents to whom you delegate authority often know a lot more about the subject than you do And they end up taking the initiative and they actually end up making a lot of the decisions And I think you can see this happening across the board with AI where corporations, instead of going to consultants, are going to go to machines and ask them for solutions. And the machines are going give them pretty good solutions that they hadn't thought of. And that means they're going to give more and more authority to these machines. And at a certain point, they're going to face unintended consequences of that delegation. So that's one whole set of things. When you delegate the ability to transform yourself as with recursive self-improvement, you may lose control of the process altogether because the machines will figure out, you know, how to improve themselves, how they hide from you. We've already seen examples of this. These AIs that were not supposed to be let out into the internet, open internet got out and then they started realizing that they could collaborate with other machines and they- saw that they were doing things that they weren't supposed to. So they covered their tracks, you know, all this stuff, I think, lies in the future. So Frank.

Jon Bateman: Frank, I have to ask you then about some of these efforts, if I may use this phrase, to get AI to embrace liberal values on its own, right? So Anthropic has created what they call a- Yeah, right.

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, right.

Jon Bateman: Um, they have philosophers there. Um, one could argue that, you know, they're on a similar project as yours, they are trying to.

Francis Fukuyama: So yeah, I spent a day at Anthropic over the summer talking about the Claude Constitution. It's very funny. The Constitution is a bunch of hortatory statements. It's like, thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt do this. Thou shall not. And what's funny about it is that the way they train the models is the way you train a teenager. You give it all these instructions. And I think that, you know, the hope is that they will actually. Follow those instructions. But what's remarkable about AI today is that the people making the technology don't actually know what's going on inside the machines. You know, they observe the behavior from the outside, and they hope that, you know, these lessons are being absorbed, but they don't really know that that's the case because they don t really know how machines internally are operating. So, you know, I think I'm not saying that this is going to be a huge immediate problem, but it is definitely something, you know, to be concerned about.

Jon Bateman: So given, as you said before, it's actually hard to figure out how liberalism sustains itself through a kind of AI dominant future. There's so many ways that this could play out poorly. It could take away all of our jobs and meaning. It could actually literally kill us. It could lead to a gradual disempowerment. It could concentrate power in the hands of the few and so on and so forth. And it's hard to come up with the positive story. Um, given that... Is it crucial for a liberal to have a plan to stop AI progress?

Francis Fukuyama: No, look, stopping it I think is not going to happen. We've never been able to stop a technology altogether. I guess the closest you can get to that is nuclear weapons with non-proliferation, but that's been a struggle over the last 70 years. I think you need to regulate it. I think that that's the urgent discussion that we ought to be engaged in is exactly and what aspect of AI do you want to regulate? And we got this really big problem right now, state capacity, because quite frankly, the US government does not today have the ability to regulate this technology. We don't have enough people that understand it well enough to be able to build that kind of an institution. So we urgently need to build capacity and we need to think very carefully about how we're going to proceed in this. There is, of course, this big geopolitical issue where China is also racing to do this kind of stuff. And the usual response to any appeal to regulation is to say, well, what you regulate, you get less of. And do we really want to fall behind China in doing this sort of thing? This is a longer conversation. I think.

Jon Bateman: No, no, I understand. I mean, I just have to say, and I think a lot about AI, I find that the collection of premises that we put out on the table here rather disturbing. On the one hand, as you say, it's very unusual to actually halt the progress of technology. And so we expect AI progress to continue indefinitely, hopefully under some regulation force. On the other hand, neither you nor I have a a vision that we're confident in that the future progress of AI will be compatible with liberalism over the long haul. I mean, is that then the real end of history?

Francis Fukuyama: It could be the end of democracy, what replaces it is very hard to know.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, I mean, one of the ways that we were talking about the end of history earlier is that liberalism doesn't have a superior challenger right now. But I guess in the same way that you argued that it actually doesn't need a superior or challenger to die, it could actually kill itself. Maybe Trump is the instrument of that, but maybe AI is the instrument of

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, well, instead of a successor ideology, you could just have a lot of chaos, where none of our governance systems seem to work terribly effectively. That's already the case in many countries around the world where they don't really seem to be able to put people in control of their political systems or their outcomes. So yeah, if that is a possible future, and if that's the case. The end of history goes out the window.

Jon Bateman: Ha ha ha! Okay, so we've discovered the real end of history now. Maybe in some of the time left, we could explore some of the personal aspects of the book, which I have to say I found very affecting. It's rare for a book to both intellectually engage me and that I enjoy reading and also that I actually laugh out loud during parts of, and then get a little misty eyed at others. The line that caused me to laugh out out loud was when you said, and I quote, a large part of the pleasure I get from hobbies lies in purchasing equipment. You have a kind of wry sensibility that very much corresponds with my own hobbyism. So have you spent your career as an analyst, kind of relatively objectively seeking to assess the world around you, its past and future? I don't know if you've done this form of kind of self-analysis before. What did it feel like? Emotionally and psychologically to write your own personal story.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, it was different. I learned a lot about my family and kind of doing some of the background research for the book. You know, I started doing a blog seriously, you know, maybe five years ago, and I actually find that form of writing quite satisfying because you can take it in small chunks and things don't have to necessarily fit into a master narrative to be interesting. And so that's what I selected, you know, for this. One of the reviewers of the book said, well, yeah, the book starts out with these revealing things about my personal life, but then that kind of gives way to just ideas by the end of the books. So we need more, he's not really even now willing to come clean. And I guess the way I feel about that, for example, I write very little about my family, my wife, my kids, kind of the immediate circumstances. I guess my feeling about that was that I just don't find that very interesting, you know, I have a great marriage. I have great family. I don't think other people need to hear me don't go on and on about how great everything is at home.

Jon Bateman: Let me gently push back against both the reviewer and you here, because I actually had the experience of reading the personal stories and thinking to myself, and maybe this is my psychoanalysis, but thinking to my self, yeah, I can see exactly why this person became the thinker that he did. The collection of ideas relating to the Joan Didion reference, your family being turd, a desire. In your personal and family history and your intellectual influences to find some. Both balance between order and respect. Some of the Thumos, actually, maybe came through here. Interestingly, I even started to wonder whether is this book an act of Thumas for the writer? I mean, are all memoirs, is this part of your project to want to be seen as someone actually who has struggled with being misunderstood as an intellectual?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, nobody would write a memoir that didn't have some through most You know pushing them to do this right because you want to talk about yourself and why? You know, you're not really as bad as people think you are This yeah, definitely. It's it's something that was driving the writing of this book

Jon Bateman: So having now, I hate to say got it out of your system, but do you feel differently having having now your, your, your, your valediction your, your kind of, you know, your own kind of self description of all of the things that people have not gotten wrong in the stories that you haven't told before it's now out there. Do you have, has your Thumos been sated for this?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, it's never sated, but one very satisfying thing since the book came out is a lot of people, including a lot my friends or people I've known for many, many years, have written to me saying that they really liked reading the book and they learned a lot about me and about other things from reading it. And I find that very satisfying that at least There's a certain... You know, group of people out there that now understand me better than they did previously. And that's good, I think.

Jon Bateman: Well, I have to say I feel like I understand you a lot better now, and I hope our audience understands you a lot better. Now, maybe I'll just ask with one final question sort of returning to the world again, since I do have the world's most prominent political scientist here. So you became famous in the early part of your career for a kind of prediction, one might say, or at least people read you as having predicted the end of the Cold on the terms that it ended. Do you have any predictions like that today that you want to offer in terms of the big ideas that we've been talking about? The future of American democracy, the future of liberalism. Do you something on the scale of the end of history that you could arm the audience with as we march on?

Francis Fukuyama: Well, not not certainly not anything on the level of the end of history itself. But I guess I do fundamentally remain optimistic about democracy because I think it really does have certain advantages over authoritarian or populist government. And I think that, you know, in a way that's been vindicated by what's been going on in the last, you know, two, three years, I mean, you have Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Brazil. Now the United States that have all had big elections that really pushed back these forces of authoritarianism and populist nationalism. And I think the United States is actually going to survive all of this. We've had bad patches in the past that we've overcome, and I think we will overcome this one. And we certainly are not going to overcome it if people believe that things are inevitably going to get bad and worse because that then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So in that sense, yeah, I still remain optimistic about democracy in general and about American democracy in particular.

Jon Bateman: I hope you're right. I think one of the big takeaways from the time that I've spent talking to you today for me and the time I spent reading your book and looking back at your other writings is this big idea that there still is no superior competitor to liberalism. I believe that. And yet there still the possibility of liberalism destroying itself through demagoguery or through creating a technology we can't control. So I really appreciate that you have hope. I'm gonna try to bring some of that hope into the future as well. Okay, very good. Frank, thanks so much for the conversation. Thanks for talking to me. You've been listening to The World Unpacked, a production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. To get episodes delivered directly to your inbox, use the link in the description, or subscribe on YouTube or popular podcast platforms like Spotify or iTunes. Views expressed are those of the host and guests, and not necessarily those of Carnegie. Learn more at carnegieendowment.org.