Yuval Noah Harari: belief

Transcript context

…You think there’s a tension between happiness and intelligence? Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems, to attain goals, and to win at chess, to win a struggle for survival, to win a war, to drive a car, to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure, and love, and hate. In humans and other animals intelligence and consciousness go together. They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them. We solve problems, we attain goals by having feelings. Other types of intelligence, certainly in computers, computers are already highly intelligent and as far as we know, they have zero consciousness. When a computer beats you at chess or go or whatever, it doesn’t feel happy. If it loses, it doesn’t feel sad. There could be also other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence. Can you steer me on the case that consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected? Not just in humans, but anywhere else. They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.