Yuval Noah Harari, The Guardian; ‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world
"Would having even more information make things better – or worse? We will soon find out. Numerous corporations and governments are in a race to develop the most powerful information technology in history – AI. Some leading entrepreneurs, such as the American investor Marc Andreessen, believe that AI will finally solve all of humanity’s problems. On 6 June 2023, Andreessen published an essay titled Why AI Will Save the World, peppered with bold statements such as: “I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it.” He concluded: “The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future.”
Others are more sceptical. Not only philosophers and social scientists but also many leading AI experts and entrepreneurs such as Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mustafa Suleyman have warned that AI could destroy our civilisation. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction. Last year, close to 30 governments – including those of China, the US and the UK – signed the Bletchley declaration on AI, which acknowledged that “there is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models”. By using such apocalyptic terms, experts and governments have no wish to conjure a Hollywood image of rebellious robots running in the streets and shooting people. Such a scenario is unlikely, and it merely distracts people from the real dangers.
AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands. Nuclear bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill, nor can they improve themselves or invent even more powerful bombs. In contrast, autonomous drones can decide by themselves who to kill, and AIs can create novel bomb designs, unprecedented military strategies and better AIs. AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control."
