Yuval Noah Harari
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Yuval Noah Harari. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Yuval Noah Harari's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The fiction that terrifies me most is the one I told myself every day for thirty years without knowing it was a fiction.
The fiction goes like this: I build things. The things I build are real. The value is in the building.
Harari dismantled that in about four pages. Not the building — the "real" part. Every company I have ever run existed because a group of people agreed to believe in the same imaginary entity at the same time. Every product I shipped survived because enough strangers shared a fiction about its worth. Every dollar that crossed my bank account was itself a shared hallucination — extraordinarily useful, practically indispensable, but no more physically real than a prayer.
I knew this intellectually. Everyone does,