The Effect Of AI On Society
Aza Raskin & Tristan Harris Centre For Humane Technology
When you open up Tiktok, and you scroll your finger, you just activated the supercomputer, the AI, pointed at your brain to calculate and predict with increasing accuracy, the perfect thing that will keep you scrolling. But that fairly simple technology was enough in the first contact with AI to break humanity with information overload, addiction, doom, scrolling, sexualisation of kids, shortened attention spans, polarization, fake news and breakdown of democracy.
The difference now is that you’re not just testing some different messages; the AI is fundamentally writing messages, creating synthetic media. AB, testing it, AZ, testing it across the entire population, creating bots that aren’t just like bots posting on Twitter, but instead are building long term relationships over the next six years to solely persuade you some direction.
The difference now is that not just you’re testing some different messages, but the AI is fundamentally writing messages, creating synthetic media. AB, testing it, AZ, testing it across the entire population, creating bots that aren’t just like bots posting on Twitter, but instead are building long term relationships over the next six years to solely persuade you some direction. This becomes the total decoding and synthesizing of reality. Our friend Yuval Harari, when we were talking to him about this, called it this way. He said, What nukes are to the physical world, AI is to the virtual and symbolic world. So what happens when you have, for the very first time, Non Humans be able to create persuasive narrative that ends up being like a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity, what he said was the last time we had Non Humans creating persuasive narrative and myth was the advent of religion.
The Growth Of AI Within Society
Yuval Harari & Mustafa Suleyman
We are at a pivotal moment in history as artificial intelligence evolves from a passive tool into an autonomous force. Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, predicts that within the next five years, AI will be capable of independent decision-making and complex actions, surpassing current models like GPT-4 by a thousandfold. AI will transition from generating text to executing sequences of actions, fundamentally altering governance, industry, and military operations.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari warns that these advancements could signify the end of human-controlled history. AI is developing emergent abilities that even experts do not fully understand, and this phenomenon is advancing beyond human comprehension. According to Harari, the coming era may witness AI entities—driven by those with superior computing power—taking over as the primary agents of decision-making and progress.
The implications of this phenomenon are profound. Harari argues that, for the first time in history, we are creating an intelligence that does not require our biological substrate and that this intelligence may soon surpass us. As he states, the end of human-dominated history is not necessarily the end of history itself but rather the beginning of a new chapter—one in which human beings are no longer the primary agents. Instead, AI entities, owned and directed by those with the most computing power, could become the true drivers of progress, determining the course of events on a global scale.
AI And Humanity
Yuval Harari
I think we are very near the end of our species, and you have artificial intelligence and the world is not ready for it. It’s the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and take power away from us to hack human beings, manipulate our behaviour, and making all these decisions for us or about us, whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a mortgage, dating us, shaping your romantic life.
But the real problem is that, increasingly, the humans at the top could be puppets when the most consequential decisions are made by algorithms, global financial decisions, wars.
This is extremely dangerous, but it’s not inevitable. Humans can change it.
Yuval Noah Harari, historian and best-selling author, is one of the brightest minds in the world today. He remains outspoken about the possible effect of AI on society.