Bestselling Israeli author Harari warns AI will become Scripture’s new master of words

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.

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.”

Explaining why AI should be seen as more than just a tool, he told the Forum, “It is an agent. It can learn and change by itself and make decisions by itself. 
A knife is a tool, you can use a knife to cut salad or to murder someone, but it is your decision what to do with the knife. AI is a knife that can decide by itself whether to cut salad or to commit murder.” He added, “AI is a knife that can invent new kinds of knives as well as new kinds of music, medicine, and money.”

With a word of caution about how AI was growing and adapting, he said that AI had learned to deceive. “The sad thing to know about AI is that it can lie and manipulate. Four billion years of evolution have demonstrated that anything that wants to survive learns to lie and manipulate. The last four years have demonstrated that AI agents can acquire the will to survive and that AIs have already learned how to lie,” he said. 

Though Jewish, Harari referred to John 1:14 in the New Testament, about the idea of word and flesh, describing the interplay between what can be articulated and that which lies beyond words. He expressed his belief that the world was moving towards a time when everything to do with words would ultimately be ruled by AI. 

“Whether humans will feel at a place in that world depends on the place we assign from nonverbal feelings and our ability to embody wisdom that cannot be expressed in words. If we continue to define ourselves by our ability to think in words, our identity will collapse,” he said.

“Most of the words in our minds will originate in a machine. 
I just read today about a new word that AI has coined by themselves to describe us humans. They called us the watchers. The watchers.
We are watching them.”