Harari is one of the thousands of experts who signed last month a collective petition for a moratorium on major AI research and experiments unless proper legislation is passed to keep AI under (human) control.

Speaking to The Telegraph, the historian and philosopher argued that AI is “a serious threat to democratic countries, even more than to authoritarian regimes,” because democracies depend on public conversation. 

“Democracy is basically conversation. People talking to each other. If AI takes over the conversation, democracy is over,” he stated, adding that power is shifting for the first time in history as AI is the first technology that can make decisions for itself.

The Homo Sapience dominates the planet because it has created fictions and built collective belief around those fictions. AI is the first technology that is smarter than human beings and has the power to create its own stories, sometimes fictious, which most people might consider them the ultimate truth.

AI will soon go much further, evoking a world where people go online and have a discussion with someone about some political issue. They might even receive a video of the talking interlocutor, but in reality, there is no person behind - it’s all AI, the expert explained.

Storytelling computers will change the course of human history, according to Harari.

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[video] Artificial intelligence created a short film about human stupidity

Power transfer

In an AI-ruled world imagined by Harari, not even the synthetic digital forgery would be human-made.