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‘Never summon a power you can’t control’: Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world
Forget Hollywood depictions of gun-toting robots running wild in the streets – the reality of artificial intelligence is far more dangerous, warns the historian and author in an exclusive extract from his new book
Two thousand years later, when the Industrial Revolution was making its first steps and machines began replacing humans in numerous tasks, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a similar cautionary tale titled The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Goethe’s poem (later popularised as a Walt Disney animation starring Mickey Mouse) tells of an old sorcerer who leaves a young apprentice in charge of his workshop and gives him some chores to tend to while he is gone, such as fetching water from the river. Imagine a situation – in 20 years, say – when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took.
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