AI technology is about to create two crises for every country, says the author of the bestselling book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”
On Tuesday, while giving a talk on AI and humanity at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yuval Noah Harari said that AI is going to plunge humanity into an identity crisis, since we have come to value ourselves based on our capacity to think, but AI will potentially outperform us on this task soon.
Secondly, Harari said every nation is going to face an immigration crisis, comparing AIs to immigrants who will bring benefits into a country, such as skills in medicine and teaching, but disruptions alongside those benefits.
“Those who are concerned about human immigrants usually argue that immigrants might take jobs, might change the local culture, might be politically disloyal. I’m not sure that’s true of all human immigrants, but it will definitely be true of the AI immigrants,” he said.
Harari asked the audience whether they want to allow AIs to be recognized as “legal persons” with rights in their countries, giving them the ability to start businesses, form and preach their own religions, or befriend their children on social media.
“If you want to influence where humanity is going, you need to make a decision now,” he said.
Harari is a distinguished research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Alongside “Sapiens,” his book tracing human history across the centuries, he also released “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” in 2015, where he discussed the existential threat AI poses to humanity.
Harari is not the first person to refer to “AI immigrants.” Earlier this month, the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, referred to robots using the term, and said “AI immigrants” will help humans with work we no longer want to do, such as manufacturing jobs, AFP reported.
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