AI could cause 'catastrophic' financial crisis, says Yuval Noah Harari

Artificial intelligence could cause a financial crisis with "catastrophic" consequences, according to the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari, who says the technology's sophistication makes forecasting its dangers difficult. Harari told the Guardian a concern about safety testing AI models was foreseeing all the problems that a powerful system could cause. Unlike with nuclear weapons, there was not one "big, dangerous scenario" that everyone understood, he said. "With AI, what you're talking about is a very large number of dangerous scenarios, each of them having a relatively small probability that taken together … constitutes an existential threat to the survival of human civilisation." The Sapiens author, who has been a prominent voice of concern over AI development, said last week's multilateral declaration at the global AI safety summit in Bletchley Park was a "very important step forward" because leading governments had come together to express concern about the technology and to do something about it.