The imagery used to describe how humanity will fare in the era of AI is getting more evocative.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari has indicated that humans will be like the cows of today with the advent of powerful AI. “Cows know that humans exist. They can see us,” historian and author Harari said in a recent talk. “But cows don’t know that money exists.” He offered a simple illustration: “I can sell you a cow and you transfer money to my bank account. This is invisible to the cow.” Even an animal rights activist determined to explain the system wouldn’t get far, he said: “Even if you’re an animal rights activist and you try to explain to the cow, ‘Look, there is this thing called money, and there is the stock exchange, and there is the bond market’ — how do you explain the bond market to cows, even though it controls their lives?”
That blind spot, Harari argued, is about to open up between humans and the systems AI is building. “What’s happening now or in the near future, it’s not that AIs will be robots that will come in the street and shoot us,” he said. “The AIs are taking over the financial system. They are taking over all the bureaucracies because they are bureaucratic natives.”
The reason, in his telling, comes down to evolutionary timing. “For us, most of us, bureaucracy is difficult, is alien, because we are millions of years older than the bureaucracies,” Harari said. AI, he’s argued elsewhere, is best understood as something closer to a new species than a tool — and one with no such handicap. “Bureaucracies were invented just in the last 5,000, 10,000 years,” he said. “We were born in the forest, not in the office, so it’s alien to us. For AIs, bureaucracy is home. They were born in the office. They are bureaucratic natives.”
That native fluency, he said, scales in a way human institutions never could. “No human banker can remember all the transactions of the bank. An AI banker can,” Harari said. “They will take over the bureaucracies like the financial system, create much more sophisticated financial systems and legal systems that we can’t understand.”
Harari’s conclusion returns to the cow he opened with: “Just as cows can’t understand the financial system that controls their lives today, we will not be able to understand the AI financial system that will control our lives in 10 or 20 years. Which means that we are the cows of the future. We are the cows of the future.”
It’s a strange thing to sit alongside the other direction AI research is headed — toward technology that might let humans finally talk to animals, closing the very comprehension gap Harari uses as his warning. In his account, the same kind of gap is about to open on the other side of us: not between species, but between people and the financial machinery now being run by something that was, as he put it, born in the office.