Yuval Noah Harari
Historian & Author
The bestselling historian of “Sapiens.” He signed the 2023 pause letter and wrote in The Economist that by mastering language, AI has “hacked the operating system of our civilisation” — threatening the human-dominated part of history.
In his words
AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.
For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.
Biography
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whose “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (2011) sold tens of millions of copies and made him the favorite big-picture thinker of presidents and tech CEOs alike — an irony, given what he now tells them about their products.
Hacking the operating system
Harari’s core argument is that human civilization runs on language — money, law, and religion are stories — so a technology that generates persuasive language has seized the master key. In March 2023 he co-signed the Future of Life Institute open letter urging a six-month pause on giant AI experiments, and weeks later laid out his case in The Economist: AI could mass-produce intimacy-faking bots, new scriptures, and political content, ending not history but “its human-dominated part.” He called for safety checks on powerful AI comparable to drug approval, and famously urged that AI-passing-as-human be outlawed.
His 2024 book “Nexus” expanded the warning into a history of information networks. Critics — including many AI researchers — find his claims sweeping and his timeline of “alien intelligence” overheated, noting he is a historian rather than a technologist. Harari answers that historians are exactly who you consult about civilizational operating systems.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/yuval-noah-harari