Why It Is Necessary to Tame Artificial Intelligence and Further International Cooperation

Stefano Rossi
Lawyer, MBA Candidate at Solvay Brussels School, former Director of the Einstein Center for International Studies

Youval Noah Harari
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Random UK, 2018

After having explored the history of humanity with his bestseller “Sapiens”, the Israeli anthropologist Y. N. Harari measures himself with twenty-one lessons supposed to be leading humanity through the troubled waters of this century.

The book is divided into twenty-one chapters, each of them dealing with a macro-theme. The first four chapters focus on the technological challenges that humanity is facing and will face in the coming decades. The choice to put the technological challenge as the first in his work, is well justified by the magnitude and the complexity of the opportunities and problems that technology can bring to humanity. Even if the author tries to describe it in “neutral terms”, the shades overcome the lights. 

First, it is likely that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make human jobs disappear. Whereas automation relieved humans from the most basic and hard tasks, AI seems to go in such a direction that humans could be replaced in all kinds of jobs – particularly the more creative ones. Lawyers and doctors, musicians and painters: AI will do it better soon. In such a scenario, as Paul Mason pointed out in his “Post Capitalism”, the traditional link between jobs and income would be broken, producing in our societies a structural change that is already starting to be felt, e.g. see the evident need to create some forms of universal basic income. The disappearance of jobs would lead to a society where humans will be simply irrelevant, deprived of any economic or political power, in an economy governed by intelligent robots trading among themselves according to algorithms written by AI itself.

Human jobs will not be the only victims of that technological challenge. Personal freedom could be killed by Big Data. If it is true that Big Data knows you better than yourself, mixing Big Data with the new technology’s developments would allow the most powerful result never achieved before. To put it with Harari’s formula: B x C x D = AHH!, biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans. It is to say that a human will not be in a position to make personal choices anymore, as AI will make them on his behalf before he would even realize that a choice was given. Even ethical dilemmas will be solved by AI – as the self-driven vehicles technology has already shown (“Whom shall they protect in an accident?”).

Moreover, the capacity to collect huge amounts of highly detailed personal data makes it possible to usher in a widespread and effective surveillance over people. If Big Data will be at the service of concentrated, non-democratic political powers, the freedom of people all over the world could be at stake (a “digital dictatorship” could arise). The author has no solutions to this scenario, as the concentration of data in the hands of either a public power (governments) or a private power (Zuckerberg) would bear high risks. Thus, the main political issue in the near future could be the property of data and the ways in which it can be controlled. It is interesting to notice that these kinds of issues are being tackled by EU regulations in these years, with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) leading the way.

To complete that (worrying) future scenario, Harari explains how the biotechnological developments could produce great inequality in the world. We have always defined inequality as an unequal distribution of wealth; but within this century, inequality could be measured in terms of physical capacity of the human bodies. Will a rich class with enhanced bodies – smarter, more resistant, and more powerful, living hundreds of years – dominate a poor class of “simple Sapienses”? 

According to the author, if biological and information technologies threaten the core of the modern values of freedom and equality, a “global cooperation” is required. But nationalism, religions and cultures make it very hard to achieve such cooperation at world level.

The second part of the book tackles then the political challenge, starting from the necessity to rebuild the off-line communities, put at risk by the on-line connections.

To this end, Harari argues that a “global civilization” already exists, based on worldwide, shared sets of beliefs: the US Dollar, science, and technology. Nevertheless, resurgent nationalism and religious extremism (often exploited for national interests) are affecting the capacity of the Sapiens to cooperate at world level. Harari recognizes that there are some existential challenges that can be governed only at world level (the technological, ecological, and nuclear challenges), and that it is necessary to “globalize our politics”, but the lesson on how to achieve that goal is not given in the book. In half a page, the author settles the point by saying that a “global government” is an undesirable and unrealistic project and that we should instead ask our local and national politicians how they intend to tackle the three global challenges – and not vote for them if they have no strategy.

But how can local or national politicians address and govern global issues? It is not within his/her democratic mandate, and he/she has no effective tools to do it. Therefore, the author thinks it is realistic and desirable that national politics try to govern the global issues by finding some form of international cooperation, after having (correctly) proved that: (i) there already exists a single worldwide civilization; (ii) nation-states are not a natural or eternal component in human history; and (iii) nationalism has no feasible plan to govern the technological, ecological, and nuclear challenges. A great contradiction is raised and remains unsolved. Even for a great thinker of our century, it is easier to imagine a world dominated by AI than the overcoming of a system based on nation-states governments.

Here, the federalist thinking can help find solutions to create the political tools to govern global issues, overcoming the blocking by nation-states and bringing about “international cooperation” with its proposal of international democracy. A debate with the author could be fruitful, and a twenty-second lesson (the federalist one) could be well integrated in Harari's brilliant work.

It would be interesting to understand what Harari thinks when he speaks of “global government”, and to point out that a federal global government could be a practical solution to avoid the concentration of powers the author is so worried about. On the one hand, it would allow to preserve the different levels of national and local governments and make them resilient to the great changes this century will bring, without concentrating too much power in a single level of government. On the other hand, it would balance the already concentrated and unregulated private global powers, bringing the rule of law at global level. 

Speaking of the rule of law, if – as Harari sustains – a global civilization does exist, we should ask ourselves why the world citizens have no right to vote in relation to that global constituency. It must be observed, indeed, that the right to vote – affirmed since centuries, with various degrees of implementation, as a fundamental human right – can be defined only in relation to a specific constituency (otherwise, it is just a theoretical tool with no connection to reality). In a world where the only constituency recognized is the national one, it is correct that the people are given the right to vote at national level. But to the extent we recognize that a united worldwide civilization has emerged, the fundamental right to vote is systematically violated if the people are denied the vote at global level. 

Many other reasonings can be carried out regarding the effectiveness, legitimacy, and feasibility of a global democratic government within a multilevel governance system. Hopefully, the pressing challenges highlighted by Harari will help share the urgency and necessity of starting to build together, as Sapiens, the political tools for the 21^st century.