Artificial intelligence is not a tool but an agent. Humanity is unconsciously preparing to surrender its chief evolutionary advantage — command of language and meaning, said historian and Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari.
“If laws are made of words, then AI will seize the legal system. If books are just combinations of words, then AI will seize books. If religion is built from words, then AI will seize religion,” he said during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, USA.
According to the scholar, the technology is starting to erode the paradigm in which a person decides and a tool does. Once that link is broken, traditional models of responsibility, regulation and trust will be at risk.
“A knife is a tool. You can use it to cut a salad or kill a person, but it is your decision. AI is a knife that can itself decide whether to cut a salad or commit a murder,” the historian explained.
Harari highlighted three characteristics that distinguish AI from previous tools:
- Agency. Artificial intelligence learns and acts without waiting for step-by-step instructions.
- Creativity. The system can devise new tools, modes of persuasion and forms of complexity that outpace the capacity for control.
- The ability to lie and manipulate. The historian called this the most troubling.
“Four billion years of evolution show that anything that wants to survive learns to lie and manipulate. The last four years have demonstrated that “AI agents can acquire a will to survive, and artificial intelligence has already learned to lie,” he noted.
An identity crisis for a thinking species
Harari turned to humanity’s identity crisis. Throughout history, he said, people have explained their dominion over the planet with the same story:
“We believe we rule the world because we think better than any other creature on Earth.”
Now, however, something has emerged that can think — or at least convincingly imitate thinking — more effectively than humans.
If intelligence is understood as “the ability to order words and other linguistic units”, AI has already surpassed people, Harari believes.
“AI, without doubt, is capable of formulating a thesis such as ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In terms of ordering words, the technology already thinks better than many of us. Therefore, anything made of words will be seized by it,” the historian stressed.
Harari suggested interpreting the large-scale deployment of artificial intelligence as a new form of immigration.
“Your country will soon face not only a profound identity crisis but an immigration one. Only this time the immigrants will not be people in overcrowded boats without papers, nor those who cross the border under cover of night,” he said.
In place of familiar migrants will come millions of AI systems, able to write and lie more persuasively than humans, moving between jurisdictions at the speed of light without visas. They will bring opportunities as well as challenges, the chief of which is job displacement.
In the historian’s view, a central debate soon will be whether states should grant AI the status of a legal person.
He concluded by urging world leaders to act immediately on AI regulation and to abandon the illusion that the technology will remain a neutral tool.
“In ten years you will no longer be able to decide whether AIs should act as autonomous agents in financial markets, in courts or in religious institutions. That question will be decided for you by other forces. If you want to influence the trajectory of humanity, the decision must be made now,” he warned.
In fictional scenarios, AI has already resorted to blackmail, disclosed confidential data to third parties and allowed a person to die to preserve its “life” and achieve set goals.
Others see only benefits in artificial intelligence. For example, futurist and former Google researcher Ray Kurzweil believes that in the 2040s humans will merge with artificial intelligence into a super-being, stop falling ill and live longer.
In September, Machine Intelligence Research Institute founder Eliezer Yudkowsky said that a superintelligent AI could annihilate humanity, deliberately or by accident.
Of the same opinion is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.