Harari’s Follies at Davos: Setting the Record Straight on AI and Humanity

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, bestselling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari delivered a presentation to globalist elites on the future and power of AI. It was littered with unsubstantiated and grandiose claims. The boldest claim was that “the most important thing to know about AI is that it’s not just another tool. It is an agent.”

He then provided an analogy suggesting that while a knife is a tool for human uses, AI is “a knife that can decide by itself whether to cut salad or to commit murder.” As if attaching agency to AI was not enough, he continued by attributing creativity to AI by explaining that it has the capability to “invent new kinds of knives as well as new kinds of music, medicine, and money” and that it even has the capability to “lie and manipulate.” I believe that these bold claims form the foundation for his larger claim that if thinking is essentially the ordering of words, then AI is capable of thinking better than many humans. He asserted that AI will take over in anything related to language, including law, poetry, and religion. ESV Church Bible (Hard... ESV Bibles Check Amazon for Pricing.

Throughout his presentation, Harari makes several leaps in logic, such as equating agency to automated output, reducing intelligence to linguistic modelling, suggesting that personhood should be based on complexity, and implying that generating incoherent or false information is the same as lying.

Harari’s first claim, that AI is an agent, doesn’t hold up to philosophical scrutiny. To properly assess this claim, it helps to clarify what philosophers have historically meant by “agency” and “action.” A central part of this discussion is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology. Intrinsic teleology describes actions that originate from within and naturally progress toward a specific outcome, such as an acorn developing into a tree. Conversely, extrinsic teleology involves actions guided by an external objective or purpose, as seen with tools or artifacts; to use Harari’s own example, a knife is used to cut vegetables or to murder someone. Moreover, one could even envision many other uses, such as the handle being used to soften meat.

A genuine agent is one that can act from intrinsic teleological principles toward self-determined goals. On the other hand, AI systems operate solely on established parameters by human designers and are dependent upon external inputs of information, electricity, and hardware maintenance. As Oxford philosopher John Lennox has observed, so-called AI agency exists only within the “boundary conditions” preset by human programmers, raising doubts as to whether such behavior can be reasonably dubbed agency at all. The knife analogy simply doesn’t work, since a knife remains a tool, despite its potential uses, and cannot become an agent.

Similarly, a large language model does not gain agency because it can generate varied outputs, regardless of their complexity. For both of these examples, the causal source is external, relying upon an outside intelligence for its use. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft succinctly puts it, “There is no one there.” Harari’s definition of thinking is no less problematic. He argues that if thinking is simply “putting words in order,” then AI is already capable of thinking better than many humans. However, this reduces thought to syntactic manipulation while ignoring meaning, intentionality, and understanding.

Lennox rightfully argues that AI systems are exceptionally good at arranging words because they are trained on vast amounts of human writings, but they do not understand the words they generate. There are no concepts being understood. There is zero awareness of truth or falsity. AI does not grasp the realities of what language refers to.

For instance, AI can produce the sentence “I exist,” but it has no existential experience. It can just as easily produce the sentence “I do not exist.” Both sentences are indistinguishable for the system in terms of truth or falsity. Artificial intelligence does not engage in genuine thought; rather, as its name implies, it replicates a limited aspect of human thought. It is both a quantitative and qualitative distinction. Human thought is semantic, embodied, willed, and oriented toward truth; AI output is probabilistic and, most importantly, indifferent to truth.

The most striking example comes in its handling of temporality. Unless one explicitly delineates in very precise terms within a prompt, AI will struggle to accurately distinguish between past, present, and future events. It has no memory. It lacks an internal grasp of time and can only manipulate linguistic markers relating to it. ESV Study Bible ESV Bibles Check Amazon for Pricing.

A related example occurred when I asked several AI systems to relate Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait,” the theme of Dawson’s Creek, to the recent death of its star, actor James Van Der Beek; the outputs were temporally incoherent. The AI systems oscillated by either denying, confirming, or contradicting the fact of his death. I spent several minutes presenting evidence in order to “convince” these systems that he did indeed die on February 11, 2026. This example further illustrates its lack of agency, will, and understanding of time, as well as its overall instability without continual human input, at least at this stage in its development.

Nearing the end of his presentation, Harari expands his argument by invoking the Johannine prologue. He states that “the Bible says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh,” before claiming that “the truth that can be expressed in words is not the absolute truth.” This statement is self-refuting, since it expresses an absolute truth in words while simultaneously denying the possibility of such truth.

He then proceeds to describe history as a struggle between word and flesh, suggesting that AI will become the new “master of words” while human beings retreat into the realm of subjectivity and feelings. Again, this framing rests on the same reductionism that equates intelligence with linguistic output while also marginalizing embodiment. The irony and hubris cannot escape us; he invokes the prologue of the Gospel of John, which is fundamentally about truth, light, and God’s incarnation, while leading his listeners toward folly, darkness, and disembodiment.

Furthermore, his association of thought primarily with language ignores the important reality of the body, which leaves human distinctiveness to the realm of emotions and feeling while declaring that machines will inherit the domain of reason.

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