Artificial Intelligence: A Guest Post by Yuval Noah Harari

As technology advances and our information networks continue to grow, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, is urging widespread education on artificial intelligence. Read on for Harari’s exclusive essay on what we need to know about AI, and what we can do to stop the spread of misinformation.

When writing Nexus, the main risk I wanted to make readers aware of is the exponential and unforeseen power of artificial intelligence. AI is radically different from previous technologies because it can make decisions and create ideas by itself. Gutenberg’s printing press could copy the Bible, but it could not write new commentaries on the Bible, nor could it compose an entirely new holy book. AI can do that. AI isn’t a tool—it is an agent. 

It was easy for people to understand the risks of nuclear technology. There was one major threat everyone could easily imagine: nuclear war. In contrast, AI creates hundreds of threatening scenarios, many of them are hard to imagine, such as new types of financial crises caused by AI, religious cults led by AI, and totalitarian empires managed by AI. This proliferation of threats is not an accident. This is what you get when you release millions of non-human agents that can make decisions by themselves and create ideas that no human ever thought about. 

The main risk is that we will lose control over this technology. It has immense positive potential, but also immense negative potential. AI-enthusiasts say that every technology comes with risks, but that shouldn’t prevent us from developing and using it. We use cars despite the risk of car accidents. But when you learn to drive a car, the first thing they teach you is how to use the breaks. Only then you learn how to press the accelerator. With AI, we are pressing the accelerator before we have learned to use the breaks. 

Humanity has the wisdom to handle AI, but only if we cooperate. Unfortunately, just when we need international cooperation most, it is collapsing. Dictators and populist leaders are undermining human cooperation, because they view the world as a jungle in which the strong prey upon the weak. They should be reminded that there is a new super-predator in the jungle. If humans fight among ourselves, all of us – Americans, Russians, Germans and Chinese – will be easy prey to AI.