Response to Harari's "AI makes us cows": the real shift is causal opacity
AryHHAry · x · 2026-09-22
Responding to Yuval Harari's analogy that AI is turning humans into the intellectual equivalent of cows, the author offers a correction: cows' lives have long been governed by systems they cannot understand (bonds, exchange rates, farm bankruptcies)—that's a description of the present, not a prediction. What AI actually changes is the distance between the decisions that regulate our lives and our ability to trace why those decisions were made. Financial markets got there first: algorithmic trading operates in milliseconds to nanoseconds, far below human perception. Prices stay "efficient," but the causal path from information to price goes dark for human participants—what the author calls rational opacity: the system keeps running while human explanations fall behind. Inside our heads the problem differs again: humans are complex systems with incomplete information, noisy signals, and free will that resists modeling, and once we hand over judgment... (original text cuts off).
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