New technology favors tyranny. Yuval Noah Harrari on artificial intelligence, democracy, and the bigger picture

Historian and Professor Yuval Noah Harari, author of several books on human cognition lays out his fears over the development of artificial intelligence in the current political climate, focusing mostly on the developed world. Through perhaps a little alarmist I found his general thesis to be somewhat plausible, and share some of his worries.

Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can’t immediately update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the world—each monitoring the health of a single human being—you could still update all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.

This is a good point and very much in line with how I feel AI researchers and students around me approach the issue: there's an immense potential for improvement and streamlining of distribution and information sharing processes, which today often are victims of human errors. But at the same time this risks moving us towards a system built entirely on a central 'Intelligence' replacing all human parts with delegated virtual agents.

Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential.

I feel like one could criticise the somewhat dramatic tone of this argument but I can't really find it in myself to disagree. Modern capitalism, especially the culture industry, does nothing if not reduce it's people to 'producers'. We've all said that when we aren't being sold a product then we are the product, and we've only moved further into this system.

As a companion piece I'm going to link an earlier piece by Henry Kissinger (yes, that guy), who seems to share a lot of similar fears. Which I think is interesting coming from somebody who has been actively involved in statecraft.