AI may reveal new truths while making your own life harder to understand. Yuval Noah Harari warns that growing knowledge can also lead to greater complexity, leaving us less able to understand the systems that shape our days.
We know far more about the natural world than our ancestors did. Yet Harari's concern becomes clearer when we compare our lives with those of a hunter-gatherer 50,000 years ago.
What a Hunter-Gatherer Understood About Life
A hunter-gatherer lived with many unanswered questions. What controlled the migration of the animals they hunted? What determined the growth cycles of plants? What caused disease and old age?
These were important mysteries because animals, plants, illness, and aging shaped their lives. They didn't have the knowledge of physics and biology that we have today.
Still, Harari makes a striking comparison: the average hunter-gatherer understood their own life better than the average person does today.
His point rests on a distinction between knowing more about the world and understanding the forces that govern everyday life. Scientific knowledge has grown, but so has the complexity of the world we've built with it.
The Human-Made Systems That Shape Our Days
We understand much more about animal migration, plant growth, and the causes of most diseases. But our lives are no longer shaped mainly by the animals and plants around us.
They also depend on enormous human-made systems. Harari names the financial system, the political system, and the legal system. Very few people understand these systems, even though they control so much of our lives.
That is the difficulty at the heart of his argument. Each advance helps us understand something about the world. It can also help us create arrangements that are harder for an ordinary person to follow.
"But our advances in knowledge also lead to creating more and more complicated systems that make it more difficult to understand our lives."
Greater knowledge, in other words, doesn't automatically give us a clearer understanding of our own circumstances.
AI Could Take This Complexity Further
In his conversation about humanity, AI, and power with Financial Times journalist Tom Parker, Harari warns that AI is likely to take this historical pattern to an extreme.
He acknowledges that AI will reveal some truths we don't yet know. His warning concerns what may come alongside those discoveries: much more complicated systems of control.
The development of agent-style AI adds context to this concern. These systems can plan steps and take action toward a goal, extending AI's role beyond answering questions.
Harari's concern is that most people will have almost no chance of understanding the systems AI helps create. We may gain new answers while finding it harder to understand how our own lives are being governed.
More Answers Don't Guarantee a Clearer Life
Harari's warning brings us back to a simple distinction: discovery and understanding don't always grow together. We can learn more about nature while understanding less about the human-made systems around us.
AI may carry that pattern much further. The promise of new knowledge comes with the possibility of a world that becomes harder for its people to understand.
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