Renowned historian and author Yuval Noah Harari warns that artificial intelligence could change not only the global economy, but the very relationship people have with the systems that control their lives. In an interview with The Economist, Harari says humanity should not entrust its fate to intelligent machines and places the issue of trust at the heart of the economic and political risks posed by AI.
Harari describes himself as a historian who does not study the past, but change. His book “Sapiens” used this perspective to look at human history, while in his latest book, “Nexus,” he focuses on how information control has changed the course of history and how artificial intelligence could affect the future.
In an interview with The Economist's "Insider" show, Harari argues that AI's biggest impact could be changing the way trust works, which he calls "the most important asset in the world."
According to him, a large part of the modern world relies on systems that have made it possible to create trust between a very large number of people who do not know each other.
Money is one of the most powerful examples.
Harari describes it as an extremely creative way to build trust between strangers: people agree to give valuable goods in exchange for a promise that someone else, whom they don't know, will accept the same money in the future.
The role of banks, according to him, is also linked to this very mechanism. When bankers do their job well, they build trust.
But this very system could face a tremendous transformation due to artificial intelligence.
AI control of finances
Harari thinks that the transfer of control of the financial system to artificial intelligence seems almost inevitable.
The reason is AI's ability to process and understand the global economy at a level of detail that a human cannot achieve.
According to him, artificial intelligence systems may soon be able to understand the entirety of the global economy much better than an individual can. As a result, the pressure on people to trust AI systems more and more will increase in the coming years.
Harari cites cryptocurrencies as an example, which he describes as a form of "AI money."
He notes that many people today have more trust in the Bitcoin algorithm than in bankers.
The same contradiction, according to him, is also seen in the way people consume information.
While trust in traditional media has weakened, millions of people readily accept that the information they see every day is selected by the algorithms of digital platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
The paradox of trusting algorithms
Here, according to Harari, a paradox emerges.
People may increasingly build trust in their individual interactions with artificial intelligence, but this trust could end up producing distrust of the technological and financial system that will be created by it.
The reason is simple: humans may no longer be able to understand how and why artificial intelligence makes a certain decision.
And it is here that Harari uses the interview's strongest comparison.
"The human financial system controls the lives of cows and chickens, but cows and chickens have no idea that finance exists," he says.
Then comes the warning:
“This is likely to be our position in ten years.”
In other words, the risk Harari describes is not simply that artificial intelligence will make more decisions than humans. The risk is the creation of an economic and technological system so complex that the people living within it will no longer be able to understand the mechanisms that determine their lives.
And that's why Harari's warning goes beyond the usual debate about jobs that could be replaced by artificial intelligence. For him, the fundamental question is who humanity will trust and how much control it is willing to hand over to machines that could become far more capable than humans themselves of understanding the systems they have created.
