Control AI Before It Controls Us: Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher, lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and the children’s series “Unstoppable Us” has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) has hacked the operating system of civilization, language, and eventually may doom human history.

Photo Insert: The "Terminator" franchise revolves around the theme of artificial intelligence going rogue and dominating the world.

In an essay for The Economist, Harari said AI has been weaponized and used to generate language, the principal cultural system that defines humanity and civilization.

In the 17th century, René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon was trapping him inside a world of illusions, creating everything he saw and heard.

In ancient Greece, Plato told the famous Allegory of the Cave, in which a group of people have chained inside a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. A screen. On that screen, they see projected various shadows.

The prisoners mistake the illusions they see there for reality.

In ancient India, Buddhist and Hindu sages pointed out that all humans lived trapped inside Maya—the world of illusions. What we normally take to be reality is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because of their belief in this or that illusion.

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realize is there, Harari warned.

Of course, the new power of AI could be used for good purposes as well. The job of historians and philosophers like myself is to point out the dangers.

We may have tamed nuclear technology but we now have to grapple with a new weapon of mass destruction that can annihilate our mental and social world. We can still regulate the new AI tools, but we must act quickly.

Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, AI can make exponentially more powerful ai.

The first crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before powerful AI tools are released into the public domain. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday Unregulated ai deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies.

Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

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