ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCES: PUBLIC DOMAIN/GETTY IMAGES

Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, from which this essay has been adapted.

Many experts warn that the rise of AI might result in the collapse of human civilization, or even in the extinction of the human species. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, more than a third gave at least a 10-per-cent chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction. In 2023 close to 30 governments – including those of China, the United States, and the U.K. – signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI, which acknowledged that “there is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models.”

To some people, these warnings sound like over-the-top jeremiads. Every time a powerful new technology has emerged, anxieties arose that it might bring about the apocalypse. For example, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded many people feared that steam engines and telegraphs would destroy our societies and our well-being. But the machines ended up producing the most affluent societies in history. Most people today enjoy far better living conditions than their ancestors in the 18th century. AI enthusiasts such as Marc Andreessen and Ray Kurzweil promise that intelligent machines will prove even more beneficial than their industrial predecessors. They argue that thanks to AI, humans will enjoy much better health care, education and other services, and AI will even help save the ecosystem from collapse.

Unfortunately, a closer look at history reveals that humans actually have good reasons to fear powerful new technologies. Even if in the end the positives of these technologies outweigh their negatives, getting to that happy ending usually involves a lot of trials and tribulations. Novel technology often leads to historical disasters, not because the technology is inherently bad, but because it takes time for humans to learn how to use it wisely.

The Industrial Revolution is a prime example. When industrial technology began spreading globally in the 19th century, it upended traditional economic, social and political structures and opened the way to create entirely new societies, which were potentially more affluent and peaceful. However, learning how to build benign industrial societies was far from straightforward and involved many costly experiments and hundreds of millions of victims.

One costly experiment was modern imperialism. The Industrial Revolution originated in Britain in the late 18th century. During the 19th century industrial technologies and production methods were adopted in other European countries ranging from Belgium to Russia, as well as in the United States and Japan. Imperialist thinkers, politicians and parties in these industrial heartlands concluded that the only viable industrial society was an empire. The argument was that unlike traditional agrarian societies, the novel industrial societies relied much more on foreign markets and foreign raw materials, and only an empire could satisfy these unprecedented appetites. Imperialists feared that countries that industrialized but failed to conquer any colonies would be shut out from essential raw materials and markets by more ruthless competitors. Some imperialists argued that acquiring colonies was not just essential for the survival of their own state but beneficial for the rest of humanity, too. They claimed empires alone could spread the benefits of the new technologies to the so-called undeveloped world.

Consequently, industrial countries such as Britain and Russia that already had empires greatly expanded them, whereas countries like the United States, Japan, Italy and Belgium set out to build them. Equipped with mass-produced rifles and artillery, conveyed by steam power, and commanded by telegraph, the armies of industry swept the globe from New Zealand to Korea, and from Somalia to Turkmenistan. Millions of Indigenous people saw their traditional way of life trampled under the wheels of these industrial armies. It took more than a century of misery before most people realized that the industrial empires were a terrible idea and that there were better ways to build an industrial society and secure its necessary raw materials and markets.

Stalinism and Nazism were also extremely costly experiments in how to construct industrial societies. Leaders such as Stalin and Hitler argued that the Industrial Revolution had unleashed immense powers that only totalitarianism could rein in and exploit to the full. They pointed to the First World War – the first “total war” in history – as proof that survival in the industrial world demanded totalitarian control of all aspects of politics, society and the economy. On the positive side, they also claimed that the Industrial Revolution was like a furnace that melts all previous social structures with their human imperfections and weaknesses and provides the opportunity to forge perfect new societies inhabited by new unalloyed superhumans.

On the way to creating the perfect industrial society, Stalinists and Nazis learned how to industrially murder millions of people. Trains, barbed wires and telegraphed orders were linked to create an unprecedented killing machine. Looking back, most people today are horrified by what the Stalinists and Nazis perpetrated, but at the time their audacious visions mesmerized millions. In 1940 it was easy to believe that Stalin and Hitler were the model for harnessing industrial technology, whereas the dithering liberal democracies were on their way to the dustbin of history.

The very existence of competing recipes for building industrial societies led to costly clashes. The two world wars and the Cold War can be seen as a debate about the proper way to go about it, in which all sides learned from each other, while experimenting with novel industrial methods to wage war. In the course of this debate, tens of millions died and humankind came perilously close to annihilating itself.

On top of all these other catastrophes, the Industrial Revolution also undermined the global ecological balance, causing a wave of extinctions. In the early 21st century up to 58,000 species are believed to go extinct every year, and total vertebrate populations have declined by 60 per cent between 1970 and 2014. The survival of human civilization, too, is under threat. Because we still seem unable to build an industrial society that is also ecologically sustainable, the vaunted prosperity of the present human generation comes at a terrible cost to other sentient beings and to future human generations. Maybe we’ll eventually find a way – perhaps with the help of AI – to create ecologically sustainable industrial societies, but until that day the jury on the Industrial Revolution is still out.

If we ignore for a moment the continuing damage to the ecosystem, we can nevertheless try to comfort ourselves with the thought that eventually humans did learn how to build more benevolent industrial societies. Imperial conquests, world wars, genocides and totalitarian regimes were woeful experiments that taught humans how not to do it. By the end of the 20th century, some might argue, humanity got it more or less right.

Yet even so the message to the 21st century is bleak. If it took humanity so many terrible lessons to learn how to manage steam power and telegraphs, what would it cost to learn to manage AI? AI is potentially far more powerful and unruly than steam engines, telegraphs and every previous technology, because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. AI isn’t a tool – it is an agent. Machine guns and atom bombs replaced human muscles in the act of killing, but they couldn’t replace human brains in deciding whom to kill. Little Boy – the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – exploded with a force of 12,500 tons of TNT, but when it came to brainpower, Little Boy was a dud. It couldn’t decide anything.

It is different with AI. In terms of intelligence, AIs far surpass not just atom bombs but also all previous information technology, such as clay tablets, printing presses and radio sets. Clay tablets stored information about taxes, but they couldn’t decide by themselves how much tax to levy, nor could they invent an entirely new tax. Printing presses copied information such as the Bible, but they couldn’t decide which texts to include in the Bible, nor could they write new commentaries on the holy book. Radio sets disseminated information such as political speeches and symphonies, but they couldn’t decide which speeches or symphonies to broadcast, nor could they compose them. AIs can do all these things, and it can even invent new weapons of mass destruction – from superpowerful nuclear bombs to superdeadly pandemics. While printing presses and radio sets were passive tools in human hands, AIs are already becoming active agents that might escape our control and understanding and that can take initiatives in shaping society, culture and history.

Perhaps we will eventually find ways to keep AIs under control and deploy them for the benefit of humanity. But would we need to go through another cycle of global empires, totalitarian regimes and world wars in order to figure out how to use AI benevolently? Since the technologies of the 21st century are far more powerful – and potentially far more destructive – than those of the 20th century, we have less room for error. In the 20th century, we can say that humanity got a C minus in the lesson on using industrial technology. Just enough to pass. In the 21st century, the bar is set much higher. We must do better this time.

Yuval Noah Harari
The Globe and Mail, September 6, 2024