Yuval Noah Harari: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. Now, this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato’s Cave, this idea that people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows on a screen, on a wall, and thinking, “This is reality.” You go back to Descartes and he has this thought experiment of the demon, and Descartes asks himself, “How do I know that any of this is real? Maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically enslaving me by surrounding me with these illusions.” You go back to Buddha, it’s the same question; what if we are living in a world of illusions, and because we have been living in it throughout our lives, all our ideas, all our desires, how we understand ourself, this is all the product of the same illusions? And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it’s becoming a practical question of engineering, because previously all the ideas, as far as we know … Maybe we are living inside a computer simulation of intelligent rats from the planet [inaudible 02:04:31]. If that’s the case, we don’t know about it. But taking what we do know about human history until now, all the, again, stories, images, paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we’ve encountered and shaped our minds was created by humans. Now, increasingly, we live in a world where more and more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly we might reach a point when most of the stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever are created by an alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence that we don’t understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won’t be able to break out of because it understands us. It understands how to manipulate us, but we don’t understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. So if there’s a set of AI systems that are operating in the space of ideas, they’re far superior to ours, and it’s opaque to us, we’re not able to see through, how does that change the pursuit of happiness, the human pursuit of happiness, life? Where do we get joy if we’re surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of the cool things humans do much better than us?…

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