Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli university history lecturer and best-selling author of popular science books, has said Europe is at risk of becoming a “data colony” of larger world powers.
In an interview with German daily Handelsblatt on October 10, the writer of Sapiens and Homo Deus, connected current international and political trends with “the revolution in information technology”.
Amid warnings about how profoundly the world was about to change through advanced technology, Harari said there already existed large geopolitical divisions regarding technology.
“The United States has banned the export of advanced chips to China, and another technology is now being developed there. This new silicon curtain divides the world into very different digital spheres, from chips to algorithms that produce news, music and finance,” he said.
Currently, the US and China are seen as superpowers regarding artificial intelligence (AI), while Europe lags behind.
“It is up to Europe to decide what role it wants to play in the future. If the EU pursues its own third policy, which is different from that of America and China, it can successfully compete with the other world views,” Harari said.
He added that as Europe had not so far succeeded in creating any relevant digital platform, he said he saw the risk of a new wave of imperialism, where technological superpowers could effectively conquer and exploit the rest of the world.
China and the US “will be able to conquer and exploit the rest of the world in a new way”.
“In the 19th century, the conquerors still had to send their soldiers to rule a colony. Today, the new colonialists only have to cut the data link to put other countries under pressure,” the writer said.
“If a nation – or the companies of one country – controls the digital infrastructure of another nation and thus all information about people and even their attention, then it has complete control. The other nation may still be independent on paper, but in reality, it is a data colony.”
Europe has the economic and scientific basis to oppose this, Harari said, but added that so far “Europe has not taken the right steps”.
He said AI had to be made safer before being let loose on society and, given that, he said the European Union had done the right thing in regulating how AI was used.
Harari said humanity was so far too naïve regarding information technology.
“For too long, it was believed that if more information was simply collected and processed, the problems would disappear. The opposite is the case, as the crisis of liberal democracies shows: people are more informed than ever, but they lose the ability to speak to each other and really listen to each other all over the world.”
He insisted that needed to to change. “Democracy builds on information technology because democracy is nothing more than a big conversation.”
“AI carries out autonomous actions. It is the first technology in human history capable of making independent decisions and developing new ideas. An atomic bomb couldn’t decide what to bomb, unlike the new autonomous weapon systems.”
“A printing press copied human thoughts but couldn’t develop its own ideas. AI, however, can create new texts, images, videos, medications, military strategies, and financial instruments. In doing so, this technology can also manipulate us at any time,” he said.
He cited the example of ChatGPT’s language model GPT-4. On one occasion, the AI model lied to a human, feigning to be a person with a visual impairment to solve the Captcha puzzle, a test to verify whoever is answering the computer is human.
Harari argued that AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and perform complex calculations made it especially well-suited for financial applications, potentially leading to more efficient markets and innovative financial products.
He did raise major concerns about AI’s capacity to create highly sophisticated financial instruments that may surpass human comprehension. The complexity of these AI-generated products could exceed our ability to regulate or even fully understand them, he warned.
“First, people or companies earn billions with it. But then there may be a crash – and no one is able to understand what is going on,” he said.
“In my view, this is the much more likely apocalyptic AI scenario than the army of killer robots.”
Use technology, don’t let it use you @harari_yuval pic.twitter.com/3f2PGTOC4i
— Big Think (@bigthink) October 9, 2024
