The following is a summary of Yuval Noah Harari's keynote address to attendees at the Eighth Annual Conference of Government and Economics held at Tsinghua University, Beijing, on May 23, 2026. Yuval Noah Harari is Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."
On May 27, 2026, the Eighth Annual Conference of Government and Economics, co-hosted by the Society for the Analysis of Government and Economics (SAGE) along with Tsinghua University's School of Social Sciences and the Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking (ACCEPT), was broadcasted online. Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," Yuval Noah Harari, delivered a keynote speech in a video presentation centered around the theme of "human choices in the age of artificial intelligence."
Harari warned that the public's current perception of the risks arising from artificial intelligence (AI) remains marked by major biases, generally being limited to the threat of malicious intent on the part of individual human manipulation while overlooking much deeper, more hidden systemic risks.
He pointed out that AI is no longer simply serving as an auxiliary tool but instead is increasingly involved in and influencing decision-making processes in more and more critical areas. From electricity grid operations to transportation systems, from financial transactions to healthcare services, AI's autonomous decision-making capacity is already playing a crucial role and even beginning to replace humanity's command over its own decision-making processes. Harari emphasized that one of the pivotal issues with transferring such decision-making powers arises from the opacity of algorithms: whereby humans indiscriminately hand over important decision-making competencies related to resource allocation, opportunity acquisition and risk assessment to AI systems, effectively abandoning our understanding and control over the decision-making process itself. This in turn may not only undermine social fairness but also potentially poses significant risks.
Harari emphasized that reflecting on such potential catastrophic scenarios as spawned by AI's future development is meant to push us to examine those paths of continued scientific and technological progress that hold out a genuine possibility to be sustainable.
Drawing on the history of humanity, Harari proposed three major lessons on how to proceed in the AI era. First, human strength comes from open collaboration rather than closed isolation. Second, countries need to abandon the proclivity towards racing ahead in competition with one another and must establish a consensus on setting up an enforceable global AI governance framework. Third, the main feature of technological risk does not emerge because of the technology in and of itself, but rather from a breakneck deployment model of "launch first and govern later" that does away with any guardrails. Technological development must instead establish iterative mechanisms for self-correction and dynamically correcting any errors as they crop up.
He underscored that human memory is the core foundation for the continued propagation of human civilization. "Memory is not nostalgia, but the steering wheel that guides you forward." As AI gradually takes over decision-making and storytelling, humans must preserve their core abilities in terms of self-memory, self-narrative and self-correction, and must not entrust civilizational memory to AI.
Harari clarified that he is not calling for a slowdown in the development of AI, but instead is advocating for "moving forward with human memory." Technological competition must not break through the boundaries of human cognition and humanism, nor does the rapid development of new industries require people to suffer needlessly as a result of their anxieties about their future. True human progress has never been about the speed of technological iteration, but is instead based on the power of human collaboration and the depths of human compassion.