Can Democracy Survive the AI Revolution?

Today, we're revisiting Rufus's conversation with Yuval Noah Harari about his book Nexus.

It's Harari at his best — a soaring overview of human history that turns, almost imperceptibly, into a gripping argument about the world we are building right now.

The questions he raises about how AI affects our politics are even more relevant now than they were back then. At the time, Harari warned that AI was moving "much, much faster" than he expected. Since then, it has only accelerated — and so have Harari's concerns. At Davos this year, he said: "Anything made of words will be taken over by AI. If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system. If books are just combinations of words, then AI will take over books." Which makes the ideas they explore in this conversation feel less like speculation about the future and more like a description of the present.

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