Mumbai: India should use its influence and leverage with Russia to ensure that there is a just end to the Russian invasion, and while Russia may not listen to a country like the US, it may be willing to listen to India, Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari said.
In an interview with ThePrint, Harari said that India also has the potential to use its leadership position to create an alliance of smaller countries to cooperate on the development of artificial intelligence (AI).
Harari, whose latest book Nexus focuses on the history of the development of information networks and the potential threats of AI, said, “A leader has a responsibility not just towards itself, but also towards others. So, for instance, with regards to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I know that India and Russia have been friends for a very long time, but India should use its influence, should use its leverage in order to assure that there is a just end to the Russian invasion.”
“Yes, Russia has legitimate security concerns and these should be addressed, but it should not be acceptable that a country just invades another country and conquers it, and as a long-term friend of Russia, India has a very important role to play here. Russia may not listen to the US, but Russia may listen if India says so,” he added.
Harari, a historian and philosopher who has previously authored books such as Sapiens and Homo Deus, also cautioned against the lopsided world order that can result from only a few countries such as the US and China leading the development of AI.
With Donald Trump returning to presidency in the US, this chasm could further increase, he said.
“One danger is that AI itself will become dangerous. But another danger is that even if it stays under human control, the AI revolution creates immense inequalities between different countries and different people, like what happened in the industrial revolution of the 19th century when people invented steam engines, trains, steam ships, electricity,” Harari said.
He added, only a few countries such as Britain and France, and later the US and Japan led this revolution, leaving most countries far behind.
“Then the few industrial powers conquered and dominated and exploited the whole world. Like what the British had done in the Indian subcontinent. The same thing can happen with AI, that just basically two countries are leading the AI revolution—US and China,” Harari said.
Global cooperation on AI
Harari said, AI is much more powerful than steam engines or trains and the danger is that just a handful of countries “will dominate and exploit the world”, and the impact will be immense whether it is on the military or the economy.
“Once you have fully autonomous AI weapons, all the armies of the world are obsolete. All the ships, aeroplanes, and tanks that exist right now may be completely worthless in five years. Once you have a fleet of AI drones that can fly and shoot and make decisions by themselves, all these other things will be meaningless,” the author said.
AI, Harari said, will also replace several human jobs. Not all jobs will be made obsolete, and there will be newer jobs created for humans, but countries will have to spend heavily to retrain their workforce, Harari said. “If you are a rich country like the US, you can retrain your workforce and you will benefit, but if you are a poor country, you will lose the existing jobs, you don’t have money to retrain your workforce, what will you do?”
The inequality in the development of AI stems from the fact that smaller countries such as Portugal or Thailand do not have the resources to aggressively invest in AI and their only chance of coping is by cooperating together.
While India is a robust information technology centre, by itself, it is not in a position to compete, Harari said.
“India is one of the countries that develops information technology and computer technology, but by itself it is not in a position to compete with the US and China, so ideally India should cooperate with other countries that are afraid of being left behind like the European Union or countries in South America like Brazil and if all these powers together cooperate then there is a chance to have a more equitable and safe development of AI,” he said.
He, however, rued the fact that the world is moving in the opposite direction of cooperation with every country stressing on independence.
“The world is disintegrating and every country, even the European Union, is now falling apart. Every country says, ‘no I only care about myself’, so cooperation becomes difficult,” Harari said.
Impact of the Trump administration on the world order
Harari flagged two major problems with the Trump administration taking over the US. One, that the new administration is “completely against any regulation making any hope of regulating the development of AI unlikely”, and secondly, it is against global agreements or global cooperation.
“It is America first. It’s only about America. In any group, it is very dangerous if the leader only thinks about himself and doesn’t care about anybody else. So now, humanity as a whole is in this situation that the leader of humanity, the strongest country in the world, the US, now says openly I only care about myself. I don’t care at all about humanity as a whole or other countries. I think other countries should be very concerned with this situation,” Harari said.
“If all the countries just fight among themselves, it will make sure that nobody will be able to resist the power of an AI superpower like the US and China,” he added.
On the association of leaders such as Trump, who leads the world’s biggest superpower, with businessmen such as Elon Musk, Harari said the biggest danger is that it can lead to a situation where “we can no longer correct our mistakes”.
“Democracy is all about a self-correcting mechanism. You give full power to one party, one person, and after four years, people get a chance to correct their mistakes. There is another election and you can choose somebody else. Even if the president commits a crime, you can go to court. Similarly, you need free press in order to report the mistakes of the government. What happens if you give all the power to one party or person and they control not just the government but also the media and also the courts? There is no longer any option of correcting mistakes,” Harari said.
“You see the same thing in Russia. No matter how many mistakes Putin makes, there is no way for the Russian people to correct this mistake. The danger is that the same thing can happen to the United States. With too much power concentrated in the hands of a few people, then it doesn’t matter what mistakes these people make, because they control the media and the courts, and they appoint their people to all important positions,” he added.
An AI-fuelled dictatorship
Harari said, every human dictator in history dreamt about following all the people all the time, but it was technically impossible. AI with its total surveillance regimes can, however, make it possible.
“There is no privacy at all and the government or the big corporations know us better than we know ourselves. So, if you have a situation where the government knows more about you than you know about yourself, you no longer have control of your life. They can manipulate you and this is the danger that didn’t exist in the past because the technology was not there,” Harari said.
He spoke about how many countries are already harnessing this technology to achieve total surveillance.
“In my country, Israel, it is building such a total surveillance regime in the occupied Palestinian territory to follow all Palestinians all the time. China is doing it, Russia is doing it, Iran is doing it,” Harari said.
He, however, added this world is not an inevitability.
“I don’t want people to get the feeling that there is nothing we can do. AI dictatorship is coming. This is just a warning about the dangerous potential. There is also a very positive potential and we need to make informed decisions about it,” Harari added.
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