Israeli historian and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari has declared that AI will “take over religion” in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday.
Speaking to the crowd of some 3,000 gathered in Switzerland, Harari had words of both excitement and caution regarding the rapid development of AI, and shared his certainty that it would ultimately become the authority over all the world’s religions.
“As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us.
Therefore, anything made of words will be taken over by AI. If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system. If books are just combinations of words then AI will take over books. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion,” Harari asserted.
“This is particularly true of religions based on books, like Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, “ he continued. “Judaism calls itself the religion of the book, and it grants all ultimate authority not to humans, but to words in books. Humans have authority in Judaism, not because of our experiences, but only because we learn words in books. Now, no human can read and remember all the words in all the Jewish books, but AI can easily do that. What happens to a religion of the book when the greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?”
Harari, 49, was born in Israel and is a prolific author on the nature of human existence. He gained his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, has been a lecturer at the Department of History in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Now he has become a go-to figure on matters concerning AI and humanity.
Speaking to the crowd of some 3,000 gathered in Switzerland, Harari had words of both excitement and caution regarding the rapid development of AI, and shared his certainty that it would ultimately become the authority over all the world’s religions.
“As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us. Therefore, anything made of words will be taken over by AI. If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system. If books are just combinations of words then AI will take over books. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion,” Harari asserted.
Harari posited the idea that AI could even invent a new religion and gain millions of followers. “That should not sound too far-fetched,” he said, “because after all, almost all previous religions in history have claimed that they were created by a non-human intelligence.”
1 comment:
Something comes to mind when thinking about AI. The meaning of artificial. Common synonyms: fake, counterfeit, mock, imitation, phony, fabricated. Algorithms fabricated by humans for a desired result. Pretending that AI is or can be a religion or replace GOD’s divine power is an enormous jump of wishful delusions.
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