Tension between Word and 'new masters of words'

Some of Yuval Noah Harari’s remarks at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Summit held in January, 2026:

And, you know, engineers and also soldiers, they don’t change the world with words. They use stuff. They take action. Philosophers, scholars, also political leaders, they try to change the world with words, by saying things. And maybe we’ve reached the end of that road. And what does it mean? That, you know, we humans, we conquer the world, ultimately, I would say, with language and words. Because, yes, engineers can make weapons and soldiers can build them, but to build an army, you need to convince thousands of strangers to cooperate. How do you do that with words? With ideology? With religion?

So humans took over the world, not because we are the strongest physically, but because we discovered how to use words to get thousands and millions and billions of strangers to cooperate. This was our superpower. And now something has emerged that is going to take our superpower from us . . .

As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us. Therefore 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. If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion.

This is particularly true of religions based on books, like Islam, Christianity or Judaism. Judaism calls itself the religion of the book, and it grants ultimate authority not to humans, but to words in books. Humans have authority in Judaism not because of our experiences, but only because we learn words in books. Now, no human can read and remember all the words in all the Jewish books, but AI can easily do that. What happens to a religion of the book when the greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?

However, some people may say, can we really reduce human spirituality to just words in books? Does thinking mean only putting language tokens in order? If you observe yourself carefully when you are thinking, you will notice that something else is happening there besides words popping in your mind and forming sentences. You also have some non-verbal feelings. Maybe you feel pain, maybe you feel fear, maybe love.

While AIs become better than us with words, at least for now we have zero evidence that AIs can feel anything. Of course, because AI is mastering language, AI can pretend to feel pain or love. AI can say, “I love you,” and if you challenge it to describe how love feels, AI can provide the best verbal description in the world. AI can read countless love poems and psychology books and can then describe the feeling of love much better than any human poet, psychologist, or lover. But these are just words.

The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh.” The Tao Te Ching says, “The truth that can be expressed in words is not the absolute truth.” Throughout history, people have always struggled with the tension between Word and flesh, between the truth that can be expressed in words and the absolute truth, which is beyond words.

Previously, this tension was internal to humanity, it was between different human groups. Some humans gave supreme importance to words. They have been willing, for example, to abandon or even kill their gay son just because of a few words in the Bible. Other humans have said, but these are just words. The spirit of love should be much more important than the letter of the law. This tension between spirit and letter existed in every religion, every legal system, even every person.

Now, this tension will be externalized. It will become the tension not between different humans, this will be the tension between humans and AI, the new masters of words. Everything made of words will be taken over by AI.

Previously, all the words, all our verbal thoughts, they originated in some human mind. Either my mind, I saw this, or I learned it from another human. Soon, most of the words in our minds will originate in a machine. I just heard today about a new word that AIs coined by themselves to describe us humans. They called us “the Watchers.” The Watchers, we are watching them.

AIs will soon be the origin of maybe most of the words in our minds. AIs will mass-produce thoughts by assembling words, symbols, images, and other language tokens into new combinations. Whether humans will still have a place in that world depends on the place we assign our non-verbal feelings and our ability to embody wisdom that cannot be expressed in words. If we continue to define ourselves by our ability to think in words, our identity will collapse.