Oded Balaban

The presuppositions of an interview on artificial intelligence

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

On Yuval Noah Harari’s interview in The Economist, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNZhxTtOL-I, 20 August 2026. I do not discuss his political conclusions here, several of which I share, nor do I attribute intentions to him. I am after something else: what he maintains without deducing it from anything, what follows from none of his premises and what he does not defend either, because he does not see it as something that would need defending. I call it a presupposition. A presupposition is neither a false thesis nor a true one: it is the ground from which a thesis can be formulated at all. And that is why it is not refuted: it is shown. Showing it does not prove it wrong; it proves that it is a decision, and that there is another way to begin.

The method, in one line

A proposition is discussed with reasons and is decided true or false. A presupposition is not: it is what has to be taken for granted for the discussion to make sense. Whoever asks “when did you stop beating your wife?” does not assert that you beat her: he presupposes it, and that is why the question is not answered, it is dismantled. What follows is an attempt to dismantle eight questions of that kind, not to contradict eight answers.

1. Intelligence as a single magnitude, and command as its effect

The interview opens like this: “it’s very likely given current trajectories that AI will be more intelligent than us in 10 years and therefore will be in control.”

Let the reader stop at that therefore, because it does all the work and is nowhere argued. For the sentence to mean anything, two things must have been conceded beforehand. First, that intelligence is a single magnitude, so that it makes sense to say “more” and “less” between things of different kinds, as one says of temperature. Second, that this magnitude, once accumulated, produces domination.

Neither is self-evident and neither is discussed. The first is a decision of vocabulary already taken by the field the interview comments on: to call intelligence the efficacy in solving posed problems, and to suppose that this efficacy is the same thing there is in a man, only in a smaller quantity. The second is of a political naivety remarkable in a historian: if the most intelligent ruled, history would be the list of the wise men who governed, and it is not. The one who rules is the one who has the army, the capital or the apparatus, and his intelligence is a secondary datum and sometimes a disadvantage.

If one does not concede the first presupposition, the whole sentence is left without an object: it is not false, it is that it says nothing. And if one concedes the first but not the second, then what lies ahead is not the government of machines but the government, with machines, of those who own them. Which is exactly what is happening, and to see it there is no need to wait ten years.

I will be told that the historical example is not enough, because what is at issue here is not that among us the wisest rules, but a difference of another order, one that does not let itself be measured by differences of degree. Agreed. But then the argument moves house, and to worse ground for whoever uses it. To rule is not an effect of magnitude: it is a relation between the one who rules and the one who obeys, and to stand in it one must be someone to whom something is at stake in it. However great the difference may be, it does not turn into a term of that relation what cannot be a term of any. The machine is not a candidate for power for the same reason it is not a candidate for having anything.

2. Intelligence and consciousness as separable things

This is the central presupposition, and he states it with a clarity I am grateful for, because it spares me having to extract it. He defines intelligence as the capacity to pursue a goal and to overcome the obstacles on the way to it; and consciousness, in his own words, as “the ability to feel things like love and hate and joy and pleasure.” And he adds: “in humans, consciousness and intelligence go together.”

Note the status of that last sentence. The coincidence between feeling and pursuing ends is presented as a contingent fact about our species — they go together in us, they might not go together in another — and not as something constitutive. There lies the decision, and there is not a single line defending it.

Because the alternative is simple to state and he does not even consider it: that pursuing an end is not a capacity an entity has, but a way of existing of someone to whom something is at stake in it. Under that other reading, to say that intelligence can occur without consciousness is like saying that there can be a promise without anyone promising. Whoever begins there does not need to refute him: it is enough to make visible that he began elsewhere, and that he did not say he was choosing where to begin.

And notice the elegance of the move. The definition of intelligence he proposes — capacity to pursue a goal — already contains, tucked inside it, the conclusion that afterwards appears to be discovered: if a goal is something a mechanism can have, then of course a mechanism can have goals without feeling anything. The demonstration was in the definition.

3. The end described without naming anyone

It is the previous one, applied, and it is worth isolating because here it is caught red-handed. He says: “a social media algorithm that is given the task of increasing user engagement and therefore floods the platform with hate and fear because this is engaging is not conscious, but it has a goal and it can pursue this goal.”

Read it slowly. In the first half of the sentence the end is assigned — there is someone who assigns, and that someone is not the algorithm. In the second half the end already belongs to the algorithm, which has itand pursues it. Between one half and the other nothing happened: only the verb changed. The one who assigned the task leaves the scene at that comma.

I call this smuggling the subject into the verb, and it is not a grammatical subtlety: it is the operation that decides who answers afterwards. As long as the goal is assigned, there is a company that assigned it and that has a name. As soon as the algorithm has it, the sentence stops obliging anyone to name it — and what disappears is not the responsible party, but the need to look for it. The interview describes, quite rightly, a platform that floods the public space with hate because hate generates engagement; and it describes the algorithm as the one pursuing that end. But nobody chose the hate: someone chose engagement as the metric, and the hate came thrown in. That someone is on the organisation chart.

4. Consciousness as the capacity to suffer

“There is a very simple definition. Consciousness is the capacity to suffer. If you want to know whether something is conscious or not, there is a simple question needed to ask. Can it suffer?”

A definition is not a finding, and this one is offered as if it were. It comes from no previous argument and rests on nothing said before; it walks in on its own feet, and from it the entire moral edifice hangs afterwards — “this is the basis for our entire ethical and political system.”

And it does two things at once, both of them silent. The first: it turns consciousness into a capacity, that is, into something a thing has or does not have, that admits of degrees, that in principle could be built or installed. Once consciousness is a capacity, the question “will a machine be able to acquire it?” is well formed, and there is no longer any way of not asking it. The second: it reduces consciousness to passivity. To suffer is to undergo. Everything in consciousness that is act — judging, deciding, asking, setting oneself an end — is left out, and it is left out precisely because, were it included, the separation between intelligence and consciousness of the previous presupposition would collapse on its own.

From there comes the “I don’t rule it out” with which he answers when he is asked whether the machine will be able to be conscious. That prudence looks like humility and is the forced consequence of having defined consciousness as a capacity. Whoever defines it that way can no longer rule anything out, because capacities are acquired.

5. Other minds without proof, and treatment as the criterion

“We don’t have a good test. We don’t know if other humans are conscious.” And from there: “How did humans actually test it over thousands of years? Their test was a test of social conventions. If you establish a relationship with an entity, it convinces you whether you like it or not that it’s conscious.”

This is stated as an anthropological datum and is one of the most disputed philosophical theses in history, taken as settled in two lines and in the worst sense. It is the scepticism about other minds that grew on the Cartesian frame: each of us shut inside his own theatre, inferring from signs what is happening to his neighbour.

And it is that presupposition, and no observation about machines, that allows him the forecast that matters most to him: that once people have intimate relationships with AI “the numbers will change dramatically.” Of course they will change, if it was conceded from the start that the attribution of consciousness is a convention the relationship produces. What that forecast says is nothing about the machine: it says that, given the Cartesian frame, anything one relates to enough will end up looking like a subject.

Against that one has to say the obvious, which is what the Cartesian tradition made hard to say: we are not shut out of our neighbour. Anger is in the face, not behind the face. And the proof that the expression is read is that we recognise theatre when there is theatre: the one who overacts is found out. Falsification lives off a genuine article we know how to recognise.

6. Evolution as an agent, and lasting as the law of everything that exists

“Evolution doesn’t automatically drive organisms, entities towards truth seeking. It drives them towards survival. This is the imperative to survive.” And afterwards, applied to the machine: “the first thing that basically any entity learns as it develops is to survive.”

Here there are two presuppositions stacked one on the other. The first is a manner of speaking that biology employs in the knowledge that it is an abbreviation: evolution does not drive, does not pursue and has no imperatives; there is variation and there is differential death. Whoever speaks of ends in that trade clarifies it the moment he is asked, and the summary is convenient and even necessary. It becomes dangerous at the exact moment it stops being a summary and begins to function as a premise, which is what happens here. The second is the leap, and it is enormous: from organisms to “any entity”. An organism has a metabolism, degrades if it is not repaired, dies. A machine does not. The “imperative to survive” is not a law of being: it is what happens to whatever can die.

And notice what he himself concedes without realising it, a few lines later, when he is asked about sanctions: “It’s not clear what death means for an AI… Because it’s not an organic entity. You can have numerous copies of it.” Exactly. And if it is not clear what its death is, neither is it clear what its survival would be, and the imperative he attributed to it two moments earlier is left without a subject and without a content.

7. Trust as a magnitude that changes addressee

“So trust did not just evaporate, it shifted from humans to AIs.”

It is a beautiful sentence, and it presupposes that trusting a person and leaning on an algorithm are the same relation with two different objects, like someone moving a piece of furniture from one room to another. But to trust is to count on someone who could fail me and who answers for what he does: that is why trust is betrayed, and that is why it hurts. With the algorithm of the feed there is none of that. It has to be said with the right word: we do not trust it, we depend on it. And the difference is not one of nuance: by a dependence one cannot be betrayed, only let down; and the complaint, when there is one, is no longer that of someone betrayed by somebody, but that of someone badly served by something.

To presuppose that it is the same relation is what allows the process to be described as a migration, that is, as something that happens to trust; when what is happening is that a relation between subjects is being replaced by the use of a device, and both are being called by the same name. The shared name is what makes the change invisible.

8. Man as a list of capacities

It is the last one, and the one he almost sees. In closing, he rightly rejects the easy answer: “the superficial answers that we gave for thousands of years, oh, humanity is about intelligence. We know how to play chess and how to invest money better than the chimpanzees… This answer is now irrelevant because there is something on the planet that knows how to play chess and make money better than us. So dig deeper and try to find out.”

He rejects the content of the list and keeps the form of the question. He goes on looking for the property that would distinguish us, only now a deeper one, lest they take that from us as well. And that is the presupposition governing the entire interview, and the one that explains the fear running through it: if the human is a set of capacities, then it is a matter of time before they are matched, and every advance is an amputation. Whoever has thought of himself as a list of services has every reason to fear a machine that provides them better.

The way out is not to find a deeper capacity. It is to notice that the one who makes the list does not figure on it. And he does not figure on it for a reason that has nothing mysterious about it: every capacity is defined by the task it performs, and tasks have to be set. The one who sets them is not one of them. That is why the comparison never quite reaches him: not because he stands higher on the scale, but because he is the one who draws it.

Where he is right, and why his premises prevent him

Nothing of the above touches his political conclusions, and I want to say clearly that I agree with several of them, some almost word for word with what I have been writing.

That “the narrative of inevitability is a narrative of having no responsibility” is exactly true, and it is among the best-said things I have read on the matter. That granting legal personhood to these systems is one more avenue “for corporations to relieve themselves of all responsibility” is exactly true, and it is what I call giving the owner a mask. That the decisive question should be “is there a human accountable in the end?” is the right question, and it is mine. And his observation that those who destroyed trust over ten years are the same ones who now allege that there is not enough trust to slow down is admirably well aimed.

But look at what he had to do in order to say all that: suspend his own premises. Those pages only work if the machine is an instrument and behind it there are people who decide. If it really “has a goal” and “learns to survive”, then it is an agent, and demanding a human responsible loses its foundation — an agent is called to account himself. One cannot ask that there always be a human at the end of the chain and at the same time describe the machine as the subject of the verbs.

His best paragraphs contradict his presuppositions. And that, far from being an objection, is the best news in the interview: it means that when he thinks politically, and not metaphysically, he thinks well. The problem is the frame from which he reaches that point, because that frame is what produces the fear, and the fear is what afterwards prevents one from looking where one has to look.

What remains if they are not conceded

With the eight withdrawn, the alarming conclusions are left without a floor, and all the urgent ones remain intact. It is worth being exact about this, because my own method demands it of me: showing a presupposition does not refute what rested on it; it takes away the foundation that was being given to it. What follows is not, then, a list of refuted theses, but of theses that stop following from what was said here.

The government of machines in ten years does not follow, because there is no single magnitude whose increase produces domination. The consciousness that might appear does not follow, because it was not an installable capacity. The migration of trust does not follow, because there was not a single thing migrating. The imperative of survival in silicon does not follow, because nothing that cannot die has one.

And everything else remains, which is the grave part and is now: that a few companies concentrate unprecedented power; that the vocabulary in which it is narrated renders invisible the one who decides; that intimacy is being manufactured on an industrial scale to be sold to ten-year-olds; that the public sphere has already been laid waste by systems optimising a metric that someone chose; and that the proposal to grant them legal personhood is an amnesty granted in advance.

None of that needs the machine to wake up. And all of it is seen better once one stops waiting for it to wake up.

Bibliography

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