AI could create religions to control humans, warns Sapiens author Harari

By Rhys Blakely, Science Correspondent

Tuesday, May 02, 2023

Reprinted from The Times [London]

The world could soon see the first religion that attracts devotees with sacred texts created by artificial intelligence, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has said.

The Israeli scholar, known for his bestselling book Sapiens, told a science conference that AI systems such as ChatGPT had breached a new threshold because they are capable of using language to shape human culture.

“Simply by gaining mastery of the human language, AI has all it needs in order to cocoon us in a Matrix-like world of illusions,” he told the Frontiers Forum event in Switzerland, referring to the dystopian sci-fi blockbuster film.

“Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them. For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society.

“Now AI is likely to be able to do it. And once it can . . . it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. It can get humans to pull the trigger.”

Harari called for new regulations to safeguard against AI influencing the actions of large numbers of people in ways that could subvert democracy.

“We need to act quickly before AI gets out of our control,” he said. “Drug companies cannot sell people new medicines without first subjecting these products to rigorous safety checks. Biotech labs cannot just release a new virus into the public sphere in order to impress their shareholders with their technological wizardry. Similarly, governments must immediately ban the release into the public domain of any more revolutionary AI tools before they are made safe.”

Harari recently joined Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder, in calling for a far more cautious approach to AI. They were among a thousand technology executives and experts who wrote an open letter calling on all AI labs “to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”.

At the Switzerland conference, he said that the risk of students using tools such as ChatGPT to cheat at coursework were the least of humanity’s worries.

“This misses the big picture — forget about the school essays,” he said. The infamous fraudsters Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff “didn’t create much of real value but unfortunately, they were extremely capable storytellers”, Harari added.

“Now, what would it mean for human beings to live in a world where perhaps most of the stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by a non-human alien intelligence which knows how to exploit, with superhuman efficiency, the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind and also knows how to form deep and hidden intimate relationships with human beings? That’s the big question.”

He added: “In the future we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Of course, religions throughout history claimed that their holy books were written by unknown human intelligence. This was never true before. This could become true very, very quickly, with far-reaching consequences.”

Humans might soon find themselves holding lengthy discussions about contentious political issues “with entities that we think are fellow human beings but are actually AI bots”, he said. “The longer we spend talking with the bot, the better it gets to know us and understand how to hone its messages in order to shift our political views or our economic views.”

He cited the example of Blake Lemoine, a former software engineer for Google who was fired from the company last year after he came to believe that an AI system called LaMDA had become sentient.

“The really interesting thing was his willingness to risk — and ultimately, lose — his very lucrative job for the sake of the AI chatbot that he felt he was protecting,” Harari said. “If AI can influence people to risk and lose their jobs, what else can it induce us to do? In every political battle for hearts and minds, intimacy is the most effective weapon of all — and AI has just gained the ability to mass-produce intimacy with hundreds of millions of people.”

He added: “We humans, we never really have direct access to reality. We are always cocooned by culture. We always experience reality through a cultural prism. Our political views are shaped by the stories of journalists and by the anecdotes of friends. Our sexual preferences are tweaked by movies and fairy tales. Even the way that we walk and breathe is simply nudged by cultural traditions.

“Previously, this cultural cocoon was always woven by other human beings. Previous tools like printing presses, radios or televisions helped to spread the cultural ideas and creations of humans, but they could never create something new by themselves. A printing press cannot create a new book — it’s always done by a human.

“AI is fundamentally different from printing presses, from radios from every previous invention in history, because it can create completely new ideas. It can create a new culture. And the big question is: what will it be like to experience reality through a prism produced by a non-human intelligence, by an alien intelligence?

“For thousands of years, we humans basically lived inside the dreams and fantasies of other humans. We have worshipped gods, we pursued ideals of beauty, we dedicated our lives to causes that originated in the imagination of some human poet or prophet or politician. Soon, we might find ourselves living inside the dreams and fantasies of an alien artificial intelligence.”

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