Wyatt Mason 
Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli medievalist and military historian, has, warned about the dangers of AI, stating that AI could prove more dangerous for humanity than nuclear weapons.
Tech leaders from Elon Musk to OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman have been vocal about the unchecked surge of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and now Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli medievalist and military historian, has voiced similar concerns, stating that AI could prove more dangerous for humanity than nuclear weapons.
In a video shared on Instagram by artificialintelligencenews.in, Harari, who is also a popular science writer, warns about the dangers of an advanced Artificial Intelligence becoming smarter than humans.. The Jewish historian notes that while the control and manufacture of nuclear weapons rests largely in the hands of human, AI is capable of destroying the entire civilizational infrastructure without the need to use weapons of mass destruction.
In the video, Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, makes the distinction between a tool and an agent which can act on its own. He argues that AI is not a tool but an agent which has the autonomy that a tool like a bomb or any other weapon lacks.
“A tool is a thing in your hands. A hammer is a tool. A nuclear bomb is a tool. Humans decide whether to start a war and whom to bomb. A doesn’t go by itself and decide to blow up, but AI has that agency,” he says.
Citing the example of AI being deployed in warzones without the need for human intervention, Harari further argued that deploying nuclear weapons requires human decision-making, but AI systems can make their own choices. “We already have autonomous weapon systems that make their own decisions,” he noted.
The academician, while stressing the need for putting checks and balances on the progress of AI, warned that AI is capable of evolving by developing more advanced AI systems that are beyond human control, and can invent weapons we haven’t even imagined.
Notably, tech leaders like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have warned about AI dominating the global software development industry in the near future. Amodei has predicted that AI will be responsible for writing all software code within a year, while Zuckerberg, in a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, revealed that AI will soon generate a significant portion of their application code.
