AI Is a Non-Human Billionaire with an Agenda
Yuval Noah Harari
Historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI represents something entirely new — an entity with agency but no consciousness.
Why we picked this
Harari reframes AI not as a tool or a threat but as a new kind of actor in human civilization. The framing alone is worth the watch.
Most AI discourse falls into two camps: utopians who see boundless potential and doomers who see existential risk. Yuval Noah Harari sidesteps both by offering a different frame entirely. AI, he argues, is best understood as a non-human agent with the ability to make decisions, influence culture, and accumulate power — but without consciousness, empathy, or mortality.
That distinction matters enormously. A billionaire has interests you can understand because they’re human. An AI system optimizing for engagement, profit, or efficiency has no inner life to appeal to. Harari’s analogy is provocative precisely because it’s not hyperbole — it’s a structural observation about what happens when decision-making entities don’t share our values because they don’t have values at all.
This Big Think segment captures Harari at his most precise. Whether you’ve read “Sapiens” or not, this reframing of AI will stick with you.