LONDON By a world-famous author With Yuval Noah Harar is a grim message. Artificial intelligence can destroy humanity, or at least take over. Artificial intelligence is already in full swing, from social media to battlefields.
This is the essence of the recently published book Nexus – A Short History of Information Networks by the historian who has sold tens of millions of books.
– What will happen to humanity if millions or billions of artificial intelligence applications make more and more decisions about us? Artificial intelligence decides whether you get a bank loan. The AI will decide whether to bomb your house. This is already happening, says Harari in an interview with in London.
Tens of millions of people have bought brick-sized books in which Harari connects historical events spanning hundreds of years and between different cultures. The book Sapiens – A Short History of Man has sold 45 million copies.
The future and artificial intelligence play the main roles in the new work. Harari sees world-changing threats on the horizon and tells them in the light style characteristic of his books.
In the Nexus book, he reminds us that for the first time in history, man has created something that is more than a tool. Artificial intelligence no longer always requires human help to learn. It makes our lives comfortable and we don’t notice when it starts making decisions that we can’t predict or control.
Harari’s science popularization has received strong criticism from some critics of the book. According to critics, Harari, who specializes in medieval history, does not know what he is talking about. According to them, artificial intelligence is strongly controlled by humans.
The core concern of Harari’s book received confirmation from this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Canadian-British by Geoffrey Hinton there is a great danger that artificial intelligence will become smarter than humans and that it will lose control of humans.
Hinton has been called the godfather of artificial intelligence. He left his job at Google last year because he wanted to speak openly about the dangers of the artificial intelligence technology he developed and said he regrets his work.
Junk information can lead to dictatorship
One of Harar’s theses in the book is that knowledge no longer accumulates wisdom, even though there is vastly more of it than ever.
– A large part of the information is rubbish, says Harari.
Garbage is cheap. The truth, on the other hand, is expensive, because fact-checking requires time, money and energy.
There is a lot of disinformation, for example, in the messaging service X, whose owner, the world’s richest man Elon Musk does election work for a candidate for the presidency of the United States Donald Trump’s on behalf of. X raises Musk’s tweets to be seen by a large amount of X’s audience.
Social media and information technology have led to the collapse of democratic debate and the shaking of democracy all over the world, says Harari.
He sees that as a result of disinformation distributed by algorithms, trust in institutions important to democracy, such as traditional media and scientific institutions, erodes. When people no longer believe in anything, they see news as a conspiracy by journalists and scientific studies as conspiracies by scientists.
– Only anarchy and dictatorship remain. Then the majority of people will choose a dictatorship, Harari fears.
Harari is worried about the weakening of American democracy in the November presidential elections.
The winner of the election gets the power to rule the country and its nuclear weapons for four years on the condition that he hands it back. What if the president does use his power to cement himself at the top? According to Harar, American voters are playing a big gamble this time.
– The president can use his power to steal the next election or to shut down independent media. We have seen clear evidence from Trump that he does not necessarily want to give up power, says Harari.
Artificial intelligence is already working on the battlefield
Harari warns against outsourcing decision-making to algorithms. Artificial intelligence is already making life and death decisions on battlefields.
– We see in the war in Gaza and also in Ukraine that artificial intelligence increasingly decides which targets are bombed, says Harari.
The war in the Middle East touches Harari closely. He was born and raised in Israel and is still a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He calls the ongoing war the biggest tragedy of his lifetime.
– The tragedy of this war is that there is no objective reason for the war. There is enough land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River to build houses, hospitals, factories and schools for everyone.
Harari believes in the possibility of peace when people understand that both Israelis and Palestinians have an equal right and connection to the land.
– The problem is the human mind, which believes in fantasies and myths that God gave this land to the people, says Harari.
He blames the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu much and says that the Israeli government wants to build a greater Israel.
– Hopefully in the future we will get a leader who can bring a better life to the entire region.
With meditation against informational noise
Yuval Noah Harari avoids using his cell phone himself and prefers to look for information in books. He describes his lifestyle as an information fast. In it, he receives only a little good quality information, which he digests over time like healthy food.
Harari says he uses artificial intelligence only a little, mostly for translating texts.
– I am surprised how well it understands different languages, he says.
Harari has been meditating every morning and evening for 25 years and withdraws into silence for a few months every year. He says it teaches self-knowledge and dampens the endless noise of thoughts.
– Internal mental storms are not born from reality but from the stories we tell ourselves about reality, our relationships and politics. If you learn to stick to reality, your mind will be calmer, advises Harari.
Harari reminds that artificial intelligence has good sides: it can save lives by inventing new treatments for serious diseases and eliminating human errors in traffic.
According to Harar, the key to living with artificial intelligence is regulation. Companies must be held responsible for damages caused by algorithms. Bots pretending to be humans must also be banned.
– Artificial intelligence is allowed to interact with humans if it identifies itself as artificial intelligence and does not claim to be human.
Harari puts his hope in a cooperative game: in old-fashioned institutions where the best talents of mankind would work. They are needed to monitor and regulate artificial intelligence and technology companies.
– We have to learn that society relies on institutions, not individual geniuses or charismatic leaders, he says.
Correction 10/24/2024 at 4:00 p.m.: The story previously incorrectly claimed that an AI-driven algorithm distributes Musk’s updates to all X users.