AI Could Cause ‘Catastrophic’ Financial Crisis, Says Yuval Noah Harari

GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA: Historian and Sapiens author says sophistication of technology makes it difficult to forecast its dangers

Harari said an AI-created financial crisis would not destroy civilisation – ‘at least not directly’.Photograph: Antonio Olmos
Artificial intelligence could cause a financial crisis with “catastrophic” consequences, according to the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari, who says the technology’s sophistication makes forecasting its dangers difficult.

Harari told the Guardian a concern about safety testing AI models was foreseeing all the problems that a powerful system could cause. Unlike with nuclear weapons, there was not one “big, dangerous scenario” that everyone understood, he said.

“With AI, what you’re talking about is a very large number of dangerous scenarios, each of them having a relatively small probability that taken together … constitutes an existential threat to the survival of human civilisation.” » | Dan Milmo, Global technology editor | Friday, November 10, 2023