Yuval Noah Harari, technologist and historian: «We have summoned an alien intelligence.» The Israeli author aims to alert governments to the necessity of collaboration and regulation in light of the exponential development of artificial intelligence.
In his latest book titled «Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI,» Israeli writer and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari takes a journey through the last 100,000 years of human behavior.
Within its pages, Harari unravels the most significant periods in history and how humanity has seemingly endeavored to achieve levels of power and capability that are hard to imagine, only to jeopardize them through its own actions, often stemming from the very power itself.
Need for government oversight of AI
In his work, it is clear that artificial intelligence occupies the final of the critical moments that, in the eyes of the historian and many other experts in the field, humanity must confront. Figures such as Geoffrey Hinton, one of those known as the ‘godfathers of artificial intelligence,’ have long been warning of the need for control over it.
Yuval Noah Harari presented these same ideas in the pages of the American newspaper New York Times in March 2023. In them, he pointed out how the mastery of language granted power to humanity, which it is now relinquishing in favor of an inanimate entity such as artificial intelligence.
For the Israeli writer, it is urgent that governments around the world take action on the development of artificial intelligence if they do not want to witness a new evolutionary form arising from human hands that could ultimately take away everything they know: «We have summoned an extraterrestrial intelligence.
We do not know much about it, except that it is extremely powerful and offers us dazzling gifts, but it could also undermine the foundations of our civilization,» Harari predicted in his editorial. There are experts in the field who believe that the dizzying pace at which artificial intelligence is evolving is already leaving world leaders and scientific and technological entrepreneurs who drive AI advancements with little time to react, but for Harari there is still a margin to act to avoid a fateful outcome: «The first step is to buy time to modernize our 19th-century institutions for an AI world.»
We must learn to master AI before it masters us,” concluded the Israeli writer.