W hat happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we're heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world? People have been arguing about this for thousands of years.

Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens became an international bestseller by presenting a view of history driven by the fictions created by mankind. His later work Homo Deus then depicted the a future for mankind brought about by the emergence of superintelligence. His latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, is a warning against the unparalleled threat of AI. A rising trend of techno-fascism driven by populism and artificial intelligence has been visible since the US presidential election in November. Nexus, which was published just a few months earlier, is a timely explainer of the potential consequences of AI on democracy and totalitarianism.

As befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens, was a history of the entire human race, Yuval Noah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. "Human life," he writes here, "is a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were." Elsewhere, one might be surprised to read: "The ancient Romans had a clear understanding of what democracy means." No doubt the Romans would have been happy to hear that they would, 2,000 years in the future, be given a gold star for their comprehension of eternally stable political concepts by Yuval Noah Harari. In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari wrote: "Liberals don't understand how history deviated from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality. Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms."

What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you're partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix, you'll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality. For Yuval Noah Harari, who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. "In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers," he writes in his engrossing new book Nexus.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. "About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being." So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st century's most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than 25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some 15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. Harari might be, after the Dalai Lama, the figure of global renown who is least online.

Throughout history many traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in human nature tempts us to pursue powers we don't know how to handle. The Greek myth of Phaethon told of a boy who discovers that he is the son of Helios, the sun god. Wishing to prove his divine origin, Phaethon demands the privilege of driving the chariot of the sun. Helios warns Phaethon that no human can control the celestial horses that pull the solar chariot. But Phaethon insists, until the sun god relents. After rising proudly in the sky, Phaethon indeed loses control of the chariot. The sun veers off course, scorching all vegetation, killing numerous beings and threatening to burn the Earth itself. The gods reassert control of the sky and save the world. Two thousand years later, when the Industrial Revolution was making its first steps and machines began replacing humans in numerous tasks, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a similar cautionary tale titled The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Goethe's poem (later popularised as a Walt Disney animation starring Mickey Mouse) tells of an old sorcerer who leaves a young apprentice in charge of his workshop and gives him some chores to tend to while he is gone, such as fetching water from the river. The apprentice decides to make things easier for himself and, using one of the sorcerer's spells, enchants a broom to fetch the water for him.

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.

The creators of AI bots that masquerade as people should face harsh criminal sentences comparable to those who trade in counterfeit currency, the Israeli historian and author Yuval Noah Harari has said. He also called for sanctions, including prison sentences, to apply to tech company executives who fail to guard against fake profiles on their social media platforms. Addressing the UN's AI for Good global summit in Geneva, the author of Sapiens and Home Deus said the proliferation of fake humans could lead to a collapse in public trust and democracy. "Now it is possible, for the first time in history, to create fake people – billions of fake people," he said. "If this is allowed to happen it will do to society what fake money threatened to do to the financial system. If you can't know who is a real human, trust will collapse. "Maybe relationships will be able to manage somehow, but not democracy," Harari added. The advent of ChatGPT and other large language models means AI bots can not only amplify human content, but also artificially generate their own content at scale. "What happens if you have a social media platform where … millions of bots can create content that is in many ways superior to what humans can create – more convincing, more appealing," he said. "If we allow this to happen, then humans have completely lost control of the public conversation.

Artificial intelligence "hallucinations" — misinformation created both accidentally and intentionally — will challenge the trustworthiness of many institutions, experts say.

Prominent'experts' recently released an open statement for a'pause' to developing AI citing ambiguous risks and yet to be proven'dangers'. I am surprised that exceptionally intelligent persons such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari and others have signed on this. If they had that option, I may have joined in too – with caveats as described below. Before expressing disagreement with parts of this letter, I agree with these set of experts that AI could be misused or abused, and present future dangers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is of itself not evil or good, nor safe or dangerous. It would have been better to exclude the "PAUSE" as an emphatic part of the open letter / solution.