Algorithms Books

“What’s true of counterfeiting money should also be true of counterfeiting humans. If governments took decisive action to protect trust in money, it makes sense to take equally decisive measures to protect trust in humans. Prior to the rise of AI, one human could pretend to be another, and society punished such frauds. But society didn’t bother to outlaw the creation of counterfeit humans, since the technology to do so didn’t exist. Now that AI can pass itself off as human, it threatens to destroy trust between humans and to unravel the fabric of society. Dennett suggests, therefore, that governments should outlaw fake humans as decisively as they have previously outlawed fake money.[54]

The law should prohibit not just deepfaking specific real people—creating a fake video of the U.S. president, for example—but also any attempt by a nonhuman agent to pass itself off as a human. If anyone complains that such strict measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that bots don’t have freedom of speech. Banning human beings from a public platform is a sensitive step, and democracies should be very careful about such censorship. However, banning bots is a simple issue: it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, because bots don’t have rights.[55]

None of this means that democracies must ban all bots, algorithms, and AIs from participating in any discussion. Digital agents are welcome to join many conversations, provided they don’t pretend to be humans. For example, AI doctors can be extremely helpful. They can monitor our health twenty-four hours a day, offer medical advice tailored to our individual medical conditions and personality, and answer our questions with infinite patience. But the AI doctor should never try to pass itself off as a human.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI