Harari: AI could become the storyteller that controls the species

Three revolutions are now hitting at once, and within one lifetime humanity must absorb all of them: a form of intelligence that decides rather than merely calculates, a scramble for control over it, and an explosion of data that lets that intelligence know people better than they know themselves, P

Parker set Harari's long-running argument against this backdrop: humans run on shared stories, and whoever controls the story controls the species. What is new is that the storyteller may no longer be human, because AI can generate belief, manufacture evidence and forge intimacy at a scale no emperor, church or party could match.

Churches, states, trade networks and financial systems are all made from words, in law books, scriptures and ledgers. Now AI is mastering language, so for the first time something on the planet may be better with words than humans, and something alien could take control of the operating system of civilization.

Democracy is a conversation and dictatorship is a dictate, and the shape of that conversation depends on the communication technology of the day, according to Harari. Before the modern era, no large-scale democracy existed, because a conversation among millions spread over thousands of kilometers was impossible; only small city-states and tribes could gather in one square, Harari said.

Print, newspapers, radio, television and the internet form the foundation of democracy rather than a side dish, and each major change sends an earthquake through it, according to Harari. Social media has done this over the past ten years, becoming perhaps the most important information technology and causing a massive upheaval in democracies around the world.

Harari called the industry's narrative contradictory: 'we will create a god, and it will be our slave.' A god cannot remain a slave, and a slave has no god-like abilities. Most leading companies and experts assume they are creating a god with superhuman abilities, according to Harari.

A tool cannot decide or invent by itself, Harari argued. The printing press cannot choose to print the Quran, and an atom bomb cannot choose its target or invent the hydrogen bomb. An AI agent could decide what to bomb and invent the next weapon, and he raised the prospect of non-human corporations run by AI with no human executives or shareholders.

Harari expects AI to take over through bureaucratic and financial competence rather than by shooting people in the streets. Whether humans will have any role once something outperforms them at finance, law and bureaucracy remains an open question, Harari said.

Social media is the first system in the world where AIs actually function as persons, even though no one decided to allow that, according to Harari. Users often cannot tell whether the person they are talking to is a human or an AI, and the results have not been good.

In the 20th century, human editors held the most powerful positions in media, deciding which ten stories would appear on tomorrow's front page and so shaping what millions thought about, Harari noted. He cited Lenin, who edited Iskra before ruling the Soviet Union, and Mussolini, who went from journalist to editor to dictator of Italy.

Today the most important editors have no names, because they are algorithms that decide what people see on their social media feeds on X, TikTok and Instagram. The entities that manage the media bureaucracy are already AIs.

Parker cited Churchill's line that truth needs a bodyguard of lies and asked whether deepfakes have turned those guns on the truth. Truth matters because it is the basis for everything, but fiction holds inherent advantages in its contest with truth, Harari said.

Truth is often painful, Harari said, while fiction can be made flattering. Unless we make a special effort to support the truth, fiction tends to win, and historically humans built institutions to search for it.

Today we know those biological facts, but our lives are dominated by huge human-made systems such as the financial, political and legal systems, and very few people understand them. Generously, Harari estimated that about 5% of humanity understands the financial system, and warned that in ten years that number could fall to zero as AI makes finance too complex and fast for people to process.

Some people dismiss AI as a glorified autocomplete that predicts the next word. When Harari observes his own mind, he finds something similar: he does not know how a sentence will end when he starts it, and words come one after another.

An alternative view holds that thinking is about the feelings around words and that its power comes from the stomach rather than the brain, he noted. The open question is whether AI can feel, and Harari said science has so far failed to produce a good model of consciousness or feeling, or a good test for it.

Harari said that AI, having read the love poems, Shakespeare plays, Hollywood comedies and psychology books, could describe love better than any human poet or psychologist within five to ten years. But, he added, we do not know whether anything lies behind those words.

He suggested AI might be language itself liberating itself from any material substrate, rather than a machine that masters language, developing and spreading through the universe without depending on any flesh-and-blood organism.