Yuval Noah Harari warned that the world is badly misjudging the timescale of artificial intelligence — and that the real danger lies not in how fast the technology is moving, but in how casually it’s being treated.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, the historian and author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” said that when he talks about the long-term impact of AI, he’s not thinking in years or even decades.
“A lot of the conversations here in Davos, when they say ‘long term’ they mean like two years,” Harari said. “When I mean long term, I think 200 years.”
Harari compared the current moment in AI to the early days of the Industrial Revolution, saying that humanity tends to misunderstand transformative technologies as they unfold.
The deepest consequences of industrialization took generations to fully emerge, he said — often through social, political, and geopolitical upheaval that no one could have predicted in advance.
“You can test for accidents,” he said. “But you cannot test the geopolitical implications or the cultural implications of the steam engine in a laboratory. It’s the same with AI.”
Harari warned that even if AI development were to stop today, its long-term effects would still be impossible to grasp.
“The stone has been thrown into the pool, but it just hit the water,” he said. “We have no idea what waves have been created, even by the AIs that have been deployed a year or two ago.”
Harari joins a plethora of senior AI researchers and tech leaders who have expressed concerns about AI’s risks, ranging from waves of job losses to human extinction.
However, what worries him most, Harari said, is not just uncertainty — but complacency. He said many of the most powerful decision-makers shaping AI are focused on short-term incentives rather than long-term consequences.
“I’m mainly concerned about the lack of concern that we are creating the most powerful technology in human history,” he said.
“Very smart and powerful people are worried about what their investors say in the next quarterly report,” Harari said. “They think in terms of a few months, or a year or two.”
AI’s social consequences, he said, will play out far beyond that horizon — whether the world is ready or not.
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