The author of the best seller ‘Sapiens’ has a somber look at the future from the irruption of artificial intelligences such as the GPT Chat: “SWith the first technology in history that creates stories”, something key for those who understand that the collective belief in stories -religion, the value of money or the concept of nation- has been fundamental for the domination of humanity on Earth.
“It is that the new generation of AI is not limited to spreading the contents that humans produce. You can produce the content yourself. Try to imagine what it means to live in a world where most texts and melodies, and later TV series and images, are created by non-human intelligence. We just don’t understand what it means. What could be the consequences of AI taking over the culture?
For Harari, the following example could be given in the future: “You go online and argue with someone about some political issue. They might even send you a video talking. But there is no person behind. It’s all AI.”
“The Nazi regime was based on technologies like trains, electricity and radios. They didn’t have tools like artificial intelligence. A new regime in the 21st century will have much more powerful tools. So the consequences could be much more disastrous. It’s something I don’t know if humanity can survive.”
“We have to understand that AI is the first technology in history that can make decisions on its own. You can make decisions about your own use. It can also make decisions about you and me. This is not a future prediction. This is already happening.”
“We have invented something that disempowers us. And it’s happening so fast that most people don’t even understand what’s happening. We have to make sure that the AI makes good decisions about our lives. This is something we are a long way from solving.”
For Harari, we still have time to organize ourselves better and make the necessary regulations in this regard, and in the interview with The Telegraph, he asked that regulations be adopted for these technologies, in the same way that it is done with medical products.
“A pharmaceutical company cannot bring a new drug to market without first going through a lengthy regulatory process. It is really strange and scary that corporations can release AI tools extremely powerful into the public sphere without any similar security measures.
