--- Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills, New York Times, March 2023
Excerpt
In the beginning was the word. Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer code. A.I.’s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers.
...
The time to reckon with A.I. is before our politics, our economy and our daily life become dependent on it. Democracy is a conversation, conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked, the conversation breaks down, and democracy becomes untenable. If we wait for the chaos to ensue, it will be too late to remedy it.
But what is "A.I."? What is the "it" that can hack and manipulate? The language presumes agency, and it's not clear that "A.I." has agency. If it's a dataset and algorithm, it doesn't have a clear boundary, and depends on a corporation to provide infrastructure to run on. Seems like an anthropomorphic fallacy to me.
