The full-length interview with Yuval Noah Harari | The Economist

Artificial intelligence represents the most significant psychological and social experiment in human history, threatening to centralize power and erode democratic control. While AI systems currently lack consciousness, their ability to act as independent agents and manipulate human emotions through mass-produced intimacy poses an existential risk to social trust. The current trajectory toward AI-dominated financial and military systems is not an inevitable technological outcome but a result of deliberate human choices and a failure of regulation. To prevent a future where AI entities operate as unaccountable warlords or corporate masters, societies must prioritize banning AI personhood and deceptive impersonation. Addressing these challenges requires immediate political intervention to reclaim agency, as the window for shaping a human-centric future is rapidly closing due to the inorganic, accelerating pace of AI development.