👨‍💻 "AI Has Hacked the Code of Human Civilization"

Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari returned to Oxford, where he completed his DPhil 25 years ago, to deliver this year's Tanner Lecture: "AI Bureaucrats, AI Religions and AI Boyfriends."

Language is the foundation of human civilization, Harari argues. Laws, money, states and churches exist only because millions of strangers trust the same texts. A cow cannot open a bank account, a horse cannot hire a lawyer, and a pig cannot read the Bible and challenge a priest's interpretation of it. For thousands of years, the code of civilization was written in a language only humans could read.

Now there is something on the planet that will soon understand language better than we do. No human can beat an AI at chess anymore—and the same will happen in "language games," Harari predicts. Anything made of words will be taken over by AI.

📹 Watch the lecture here.

Will AI take over the world?

🔥 — Yes, it is inevitable
👎 — No, it is impossible