Artificial Intelligence ‘could create religion of the future’

The world could soon see the first religion that attracts devotees with sacred texts created by AI, historian Yuval Noah Harari warns.r

A Victorian stained glass window in an ancient English Church depicting Jesus ascending into heaven watched by the apostles, saints and angels.

The world could soon see the first religion that attracts devotees with sacred texts created by artificial intelligence, the historian Yuval Noah Harari said.

The Israeli scholar, known for the best-selling book Sapiens, told a science conference that AI systems such as ChatGPT have breached a new threshold because they are capable of using language to shape human culture.

“Simply by gaining mastery of the human language, AI has all it needs in order to cocoon us in a Matrix-like world of illusions,” he told the Frontiers Forum science conference in Switzerland. “Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them. For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society.

“Now AI is likely to be able to do it,” he added. “And once it can … it doesn’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. It can get humans to pull the trigger.” He called for new regulations to safeguard against AI influencing the actions of large numbers of people in ways that could subvert democracy. “We need to act quickly before AI gets out of our control,” he said.

Drawing parallels with drug safety tests, he added: “Governments must immediately ban the release into the public domain of any more revolutionary AI tools before they are made safe.”

Harari, 47, recently joined Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, in calling for a far more cautious approach to AI.

Speaking in Switzerland, he said that the risk of students using tools such as ChatGPT to cheat at coursework were the least of humanity’s worries. “This misses the big picture: forget about the school essays,” he said.

The infamous fraudsters Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff “didn’t create much of real value. But unfortunately, they were extremely capable storytellers”, he pointed out.

“Now, what would it mean for human beings to live in a world where perhaps most of the stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by a non-human alien intelligence which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind and also knows how to form deep and hidden intimate relationships with human beings? That’s the big question.”

He added: “In the future we might see the first cults and religions in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Of course, religions throughout history claimed that their holy books were written by unknown human intelligence.

“This was never true before – this could become true very, very quickly, with far reaching consequences.”

He was speaking after Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering British computer scientist who has been called the “godfather of AI”, quit his role at Google to warn of the technology’s dangers.

Hinton said he found the pace of advance “scary” and was worried about job losses and disinformation. He also raised fears about the threat of training AI to be more intelligent than humans.

The Times