PERSON
Yuval Noah Harari
The historian of human cooperation who reframed AI as the first non-human author of the shared fictions that civilization runs on—and the clearest voice on what it means when the species that lives by storytelling must share that power with a machine that tells stories without believing any of them.
Harari is the historian of the fiction that holds civilization together. His central argument, developed across
Sapiens,
Homo Deus, and
Nexus, is that
the Cognitive Revolution gave
Homo sapiens one decisive advantage over every other animal: the capacity to cooperate flexibly in millions on the strength of
shared fictions—gods, nations, money, corporations, human rights—that exist nowhere but in the collective imagination, and yet build cathedrals and move armies. Artificial intelligence now threatens that monopoly: a
large language model can generate the very medium—fluent, persuasive, tailored narrative—through which shared fictions are made and sustained, without understanding, believing, or caring about any of them. Harari connects this to a cascade of further dangers: the
religion of data that treats information flow as the supreme value, the prospect of a
useless class rendered economically superfluous by intelligent machines, and the migration of authority from