Hold your AI horses
Experts warn that it could seize humanity’s master key language
When Yuval Noah Harari writes about something, it is as if the world’s conscience is speaking. One example was his essay in The Economist after Russia invaded Ukraine last year.
Now the Israeli academic and historian has joined the uproar over the further development of artificial intelligence (AI).
He, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, founders of the Center for Humane Technology, have written a stinging opinion piece for The New York Times.
Referencing a 2022 survey with 700 AI academics and researchers, they wrote: “Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10% or greater chance of human extinction (or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment) from future AI systems.”
They used the analogy of half the engineers who built an aircraft warning that there was a “10% chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it”.
The question they ask is: “Would you still board?”
It’s a stark warning, and the writers elaborate on it. “Language is the operating system of human culture,” they say. “From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations, and computer code. AI’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilisation.”
It gets worse: “By gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key to civilisation, from bank vaults to holy sepulchres.”
We humans have used our language to survive and grow. Language is the best feature of our enhanced forebrains, themselves an evolutionary boon from early ability to use tools (with which we could kill animals) and make fire (to cook the meat, predigesting the protein, which is essential because we lack the teeth and intestines to eat raw meat).
“In games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer,” Harari writes. “What happens when the same thing occurs in art, politics or religion?”
He’s not alone in this dire warning. About 1,000 AI experts and investors last month penned an open letter calling for a slowdown in the AI arms race. Specifically, they advise a “stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities”. These “giant” AIs need at least a six-month period to assess the possible dangers.
“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control,” says the letter, whose signatories include OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, Apple’s Steve Wozniak and engineers from Amazon, Google, DeepMind, Meta and Microsoft. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”
Harari warned that “the time to reckon with AI is before our politics, our economy and our daily life become dependent on it. Democracy is a conversation, conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked, the conversation breaks down, and democracy becomes untenable.
“If we wait for the chaos to ensue, it will be too late to remedy it.” x