Yuval Noah Harari: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, one of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized and instead of manipulating us at scale, there would be assistants that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better. Even interactions with large language models now, if you ask them questions, it doesn’t have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from other sources of information. It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides. It just feels like the potential is there to have a really nice friend who’s an encyclopedia that just tells you all the different perspectives, even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues, to say, these are the different theories. These are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories, but here’s the kind of backing for those conspiracy. It just lays it all out. Then with a calm language, without the words that kind of presume there’s some kind of manipulation going on underneath it all. It’s quite refreshing. Of course, those are the early days. People can step in and start to sensor it to manipulate those algorithms, to start to input some of the human biases in there as opposed to what’s currently happening is kind of the internet is input, compress it, and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the different issues. I mean, there’s a lot of promise there also, right? Absolutely. I mean, if there was no promise, there was no problem. If this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it. Now, obviously, it has tremendous positive potential in things like what you just described in better medicine, better healthcare, better education, so many promises. This is also why it’s so dangerous, because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there, and it has some dangerous potential also. We shouldn’t ignore it. Again, I’m not advocating banning it, just to be careful about how we, not so much develop it, but most importantly how we deploy it into the public sphere. This is the key question. You look back at history, and one of the things we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say, “AI, we’ve been here before. We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the Industrial Revolution.” Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid and it’ll take jobs and the bad actors. In the end it’s okay. As a historian, my tendency is yes, in the end it’s okay, but in the end there is a learning curve. There is a lot of failed experiments on the way to learning how to use the new technology. These failed experiments could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people. If you think about the last really big revolution, the Industrial Revolution, yes, in the end, we learned how to use the powers of industry; electricity, radio, trains, whatever, to build better human societies. On the way, we had all these experiments like European imperialism, which was driven by the Industrial Revolution. It was a question, how do you build an industrial society? Oh, you build an empire. You control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets. Then you had communism, another big experiment on how to build an industrial society. You had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of industry? We had all these failed experiments on the way. If we now have the same type of failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century, with AI, with bioengineering, it could cost the lives of, again, hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species. As a historian, when people talk about the examples from history, from new technologies, I’m not so optimistic. We need to think about the failed experiment, which accompanied every major new technology. This intelligence thing, like you were saying, is a double-edged sword, is that every new thing it helps us create, it can both save us and destroy us. It’s unclear each time, which will happen. That’s maybe why we don’t see any aliens.…

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