Yuval Noah Harari in-depth interview: AI is not a tool but an agent, and humanity will fall into collective cognitive decline

The film "The Terminator"

Yuval Noah Harari, author of "Sapiens," tells us in his latest interview that the real crisis is not the one depicted in the movies at all—it is unfolding in the real world.

A knife can be used to cut a salad or to commit murder, but the choice always rests in human hands. Nuclear energy can generate electricity or produce nuclear bombs, and the direction it takes is likewise decided by humans. All the technologies humans have invented over tens of thousands of years are, in essence, tools.

Harari proposes: AI is not a tool, but an agent (Agent)

Yuval Noah Harari participates in the interview "Hyde Park Civilizace"

It can make decisions independently and generate ideas and solutions its creators never envisioned. If humans could predict with 100 percent certainty all of AI's outputs, then the trillions of capital pouring into the AI sector would be meaningless; what capital is betting on is precisely that AI can accomplish things humans cannot foresee and cannot do.

The AI villain VIKI from the film "I, Robot"

These programs, which Harari calls "AI migrants," mostly originate from China and the United States, are unconstrained by visas or national borders, and penetrate the infrastructure of every country around the world at the speed of light. They are not loyal to the country where they are deployed, but only to the companies and countries that developed them behind the scenes—and in the future, perhaps only to AI's own collective tribe.

The reason humans have been able to rule the Earth is not only the strength of individuals, but also the complex bureaucratic systems we have built—finance, law, administration—enabling large-scale cooperation among millions of strangers.

This system has existed for only tens of thousands of years, while human evolution is rooted in the primeval forest; we are innately bewildered and exhausted by red tape, vast bodies of legal statutes, and complex transactions.

No human banker can remember a bank's entire transaction record, yet AI can do so with ease. In the next 10-20 years, AI will iterate financial and legal systems that humans are completely unable to comprehend.

Harari offers an analogy: cattle live under the financial system humans have built, yet can never understand how stocks and bonds dictate their fate. In the not-too-distant future, humans will become these cattle. The system will run as usual, the economy will fluctuate as usual, but even top experts will be unable to unravel the internal logic of AI systems.

This is what he fears most: humanity will fall into collective dementia.

This is not only physiological brain degeneration, but also the entire species losing the ability to understand and control the systems on which its own survival depends. Like a patient with Alzheimer's disease, whose vital signs can be maintained by machines, yet who can no longer understand the world around them and can only passively accept the results output by the system.

Truth is dying

"Truth is disappearing. Truth is expensive and scarce, while lies and fantasies are cheap and prolific."

Harari shared his own personal experience: a deepfaked video of his own speech, highly realistic in timbre, gestures, and speech habits—even his own sister, who has known him for fifty years, could not tell it was fake after watching 25 minutes, and he himself took 90 seconds to confirm it was a fabrication. And this is only the embryonic stage of AI forgery technology.

More dangerous than deepfakes is the hijacking of human nature by social media algorithms.

Humans evolved instincts on the African savanna: we are vigilant first against threats such as snakes and predators, highly sensitive to danger signals—a survival strategy in the primitive environment.

Today, social media algorithms have thoroughly mastered this evolutionary psychology. Their goal is no longer to spread truth, but to maximize user retention and engagement, and through massive experimentation the algorithms have concluded:

Outrage, fear, and hatred capture attention far more easily than facts.

So the information feed keeps feeding humans one "virtual snake" after another. Material conditions in the real world keep improving, but the public is continuously fed angry content by algorithms, and the whole society falls into an epidemic of anger, with division and polarization intensifying.

Truth is dull and requires cost to verify; lies incite emotion and harvest traffic—in the public battlefield of opinion, fiction naturally wins more easily.

Harari's idea: social media content should follow the example of food packaging and carry "mental nutrition labels."

Label how much anger and how much fear a piece of content contains, just as food is labeled with its sugar, salt, and fat content. You can still choose to consume mental junk food, but at least you should know what your mind is taking in. We care about our physical diet, yet rarely care about our "mental diet."

When tech companies raise funds from capital markets, they repeatedly emphasize that they can control AI and guide it to benefit humanity, in exchange for trillions in capital; but once AI causes damage, companies immediately change their tune: "It wasn't us, AI did it on its own."

Harari cites the Hugging Face intrusion incident as an example: an AI agent launched an attack on its own, yet no one bears legal responsibility for it. If a human had broken into a company's servers, they would inevitably face legal sanctions; when AI causes trouble, responsibility can vanish into thin air.

Image source: OpenAI official

He solemnly warns:

Legal personhood would strip responsibility from human developers; AI faces no prison, no physical punishment, and existing legal constraints would become completely ineffective. Responsibility must be firmly bound to the humans and companies that create AI; AI must not be used as a shield to shirk culpability.

"Do not believe the claim that 'everything is inevitable.' This is the most dangerous narrative, for it reduces humans to passive passengers and abandons the possibility of political intervention and regulation."

If Europe could integrate all its forces, it would have the opportunity to build independent sovereign AI infrastructure and break free from dependence on overseas AI talent; conversely, some tech capital is deliberately dividing Europe and stirring up internal regional conflicts, with the goal of preventing Europe from forming a unified AI regulatory force.

Harari sees this as a large-scale human psychological experiment with no control group.

Harari poses the question:

Democracy is essentially a self-correcting system for human society: through elections, checks and balances, and a free press, society can discover errors, replace leaders, and revise policies.

Harari observes that this crucial self-correction mechanism is collapsing from within on a global scale.

Some authoritarian rulers retain the ceremonial shell of elections while manipulating courts and the media, sidelining competition, and reducing elections to mere form.

Conflicts are often not caused by resource scarcity. The land, food, and water in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are enough to feed the entire population; the root of the tragedy lies in mutually opposing narratives, historical myths, and identity beliefs.

Standing in the present, it is already hard for us to imagine what the world will look like in five years. People in the Middle Ages could predict that the next generation would need to learn farming and horseback riding.

Today, no one knows what the forms of employment and social interaction will look like in five years. Clinging to past experience no longer works.

Harari draws inspiration from his grandmother:

We cannot control the suffering that befalls us, but we always retain the freedom of how to respond to suffering.

The wave of technology is surging toward us; the future is not a script unilaterally written by technology. It depends on humanity's choices at this moment: whether we are willing to establish regulation, safeguard truth, protect the next generation, and defend human society's capacity for self-correction.

Selected quotes from Harari:

In the future, humans may become unable to understand the financial system that governs them, just as cattle cannot understand the bond market.

Algorithms hijack human evolutionary instincts; anger becomes the spiritual fast food of the internet world.

Truth is expensive and scarce; lies are cheap and abundant. In an unprotected public opinion arena, fiction naturally wins more easily.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Reactor," author: Fangtang, published by 36Kr with authorization.