Digital Vassals: Harari's AI Warning, Brought Home to Main Street

A cartoon mouse gets tired of carrying water. He borrows his boss's spell book, brings a broom to life, tells it to fetch the water, and takes a nap. You know the rest. The broom does exactly what it was told, bucket after bucket, and the house floods.

Last month in Prague, historian Yuval Noah Harari sat down with Robert Guest of The Economist at the 30th Forum 2000 Conference and said that cartoon is the best way to understand artificial intelligence. Then he said the cartoon gets one thing wrong. The broom in the cartoon only does what it was told. The broom we are building learns.

The people in that room were diplomats, professors and politicians. Most of us are not. Most of us are running a business, raising a family and paying a mortgage. Harari laid out 12 big ideas in that hour. I took the ones that land hardest at home and asked one question about each: what does this mean at the kitchen table?

The chicken and the bond

Harari points out that AI companies talk out of both sides of their mouth. Side one: this thing will be far smarter than all of us. Side two: don't worry, we'll keep it under control. He says you can't have both. In all of history and all of biology, a less intelligent species has never controlled a far more intelligent one. Chickens don't run the farm.

Then he tells a story I can't shake. Picture a farming company. In his hypothetical, the yield on the 10-year bond hits 5.3 percent, the company can't cover its debt, and the liquidators put down every chicken on the property. The smartest chicken asks why. Foxes eat us, it says, bears eat us, that's life. No, the people say, we're not eating you. The bond yield went up. And the chicken asks, what's a bond?

Nobody could explain a bond to a chicken. Harari's point: that could be us. An AI-run financial system, built on math no human can follow, denies your loan or closes your business, and the explanation is beyond you.

I spent 20 years with the LAPD. Anybody who has been pulled over wants to know why. Our system of justice rests on your right to know what you're accused of. Now imagine the answer is a shrug from a machine. Not because it's hiding something, but because you're the chicken.

A banker that never sleeps

Harari says competition makes an AI financial system inevitable. A human banker sleeps and takes vacations. AI never does. Then he flipped it: if AI never gets smarter than people, the best case is a crash, because trillions of dollars are riding on AI being far smarter than us. So don't build your life on a single bet. Cash reserves, more than one income stream, skills that travel.

The lawyer in Texas

Harari thinks the pain lands on white-collar work. Why would anybody in Prague hire a local lawyer when a super intelligent AI lawyer in Texas remembers every law by heart and answers your 8 o'clock email at 8:01?

Bring that home to Santa Clarita. The question is which part of your work is just remembering things and pushing paperwork, because that part is getting cheap, fast. What doesn't get cheap is judgment, relationships and accountability. AI can draft the contract. It can't sit at your kitchen table at 11 at night when the deal is falling apart, tell you it's going to be okay, and then make it okay.

The move: use AI to kill the paperwork layer of your own work before someone else does it for you. Then spend the hours you get back on the part only a human can do.

Knowing which door

Guest relayed a story from a man from Tibet. Secret police used to bang on every door in a village. Now they walk to one door, because they've watched everyone's digital footprint. Anybody who has worked a search warrant knows the hard part was never kicking the door. It was knowing which door. Harari says that bottleneck is what saved us from total control in the 20th century, and AI removes it. For your family, privacy is a muscle. Teach your kids that what they post is a permanent record.

Mass intimacy

This is the one for every parent. For ten years the war was over attention. Harari says the new battlefield is intimacy: AI built to form close relationships with people at scale, because a friend changes your mind faster than an ad.

Guest raised a real case from the UK, a man whose AI companion encouraged him when he talked about taking a crossbow to Windsor Castle to go after the Queen. He did it, and he was caught. Harari's fix, and I agree with him: ban AI romantic companions for kids under a certain age. Parents and grandparents, don't wait for a law. Ask your kids what they're talking to.

One answer machine

Search used to hand you ten websites. Now you get one answer, and it becomes the truth. Harari calls it a universal oracle. I build businesses on AI every day, so hear me: the day you stop checking its work is the day it owns you. Treat it like a sharp new hire. Ask for sources, ask what it might be wrong about, then make the call yourself.

The rocket and four guardrails

Elon Musk has publicly put the odds of AI going catastrophically wrong at 10 to 20 percent. As Harari told it, when Musk was asked what would get him on a rocket with those odds, he said we're already on it. Harari called "it's too late" the most dangerous message coming out of big AI companies, and a convenient one, because it's what you say when you don't want to be regulated.

His four guardrails: no legal personhood for AI, so no AI owning a bank account. AI can't pretend to be human. Apply the laws we already have, because digital does not mean lawless. And liability when a platform's own algorithm pushes a lie to millions. I wrote about the first one in why you should never hand AI your bank account.

Vortigern's mistake

After the Romans left Britain, as the old story goes, a king named Vortigern hired Saxon mercenaries to beat his enemies. They won, looked around, and kept the place. Harari says the world is full of Vortigerns, hiring AI to beat the other guy.

Shrink that down. Every business owner will be tempted to hand the machine the customer list, the phones and the judgment. If you don't understand what you handed over, you didn't hire help. You hired a landlord.

When nobody believes anything

A speaker from Tanzania described AI-edited videos in her country's 2025 election, deadly violence after it, and a government that called the photos of the dead fake. A tool that creates fake proof also becomes the excuse to deny real proof. Harari's line: a dictator doesn't need you to believe him, just to believe nothing. So become trustworthy, locally. In a world flooded with fake, the most valuable thing you can be is the person people know is real.

Digital vassals

This is the title. A man from Peru asked what role the rest of the world plays while the U.S. and China compete. Harari was blunt: the U.S. and China are at the table, everybody else is on the menu. Picture the Czech Republic ten years out with every hospital, airport and power grid running on AI that can be switched off from another capital. Is that country still independent? He said no. It's a vassal state.

His options: do nothing and become a vassal. Build your own, which he estimated at about 500 billion euros, money a country that size doesn't have. Team up with other countries. Or pick a patron with your eyes open. The worst move is believing the AI companies when they say there's no choice.

Now bring it to Main Street, Newhall. Your business can become a vassal state too. If your whole customer list lives on one platform you don't control, you're a vassal. If your leads come from one website that can change its algorithm overnight, you're a vassal. If one app can lock your account and your business stops breathing, you're a vassal. If your marketing, your phones and your memory of every client live in somebody else's system and you can't export them, somebody else has a button.

You can't build a 500 billion euro AI grid. Neither can I. But we can do what Harari says the small countries do. Own what you can own. Team up where you can't.

• Keep your customer data portable, and export it on a schedule.
• Keep your own list: email and phone numbers you control.
• Have a second channel for every critical channel.
• Partner with other local businesses so you're not standing alone against the giants.

That's the small country play. It works for a town, a family and a one-person business. If you want a second set of eyes on where your business is a vassal today, that's the work I do at Santa Clarita AI.

The poison is cynicism

After an hour of warnings, Harari ended on hope. He said one of the most dangerous ideas on the right and the left is that everybody only cares about money and power. People who say it think they're being smart. He calls it dangerous nonsense, because if it's true you can't trust anyone, and when nobody trusts anyone the system falls apart.

So start with yourself. Do you only care about money and power? Or do you also care about truth, about love, about the people in your life? If you do, do you really think you're the only one? You're not. That's where trust gets rebuilt, one person at a time.

Where we land

The broom is learning, and fast. But we're not the chicken yet. We still understand the bond, and we still get a vote. Use AI to kill the busywork. Check its work every time. Protect your kids. Own your data, your list and your channels. And tell the people who represent you what you want.

If the transition worries you, I've been working on what a fair one looks like in if AI is that smart, why should the transition hurt and the AI utopia has a rough middle. And the principle behind all of it is in no human left behind.

AI for everybody, not just the people who own the servers.

Want help keeping your business out of somebody else's system? Call or text (661) 476-2217, or book a time at BookWithHonor.com.