Industrialization ultimately led to better, more prosperous societies, but on the way there, huge mistakes were made. Will the same happen with AI?
Historian Yuval Noah Harari draws a parallel between industrialization and AI, noting that while industrialization eventually led to prosperous societies, it caused significant harm along the way, and asks whether AI will follow a similar pattern.
Background
- Yuval Noah Harari is a bestselling historian and author of *Sapiens*, *Homo Deus*, and *Nexus*. He frequently comments on the societal impact of technology, especially AI.
- This tweet compares AI's potential trajectory to the Industrial Revolution: a technology that eventually raised living standards but first caused upheaval (child labor, urban squalor, wars, colonialism, environmental destruction).
- The core question is whether society can steer AI development to avoid similar "growing pains"—or whether we will repeat the pattern of letting powerful technologies cause harm before we learn to regulate them.
- Harari has argued that AI is different from past technologies because it is the first capable of making decisions and creating ideas autonomously, not just tools humans wield.