Yuval Noah Harari: belief

Transcript context

…Let me ask you kind of a big philosophical question about AI and the threat of it. Let’s look at the threat side. So folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky worry that AI might kill all of us. Do you worry about that range of possibilities where artificial intelligence systems in a variety of ways might destroy human civilization? Yes. I talk a lot about it, about the dangers of AI. I sometimes get into trouble because I depict these scenarios of how AI becoming very dangerous, and then people say that I’m encouraging these scenarios. But I’m talking about it as a warning. I’m not so terrified of the simplistic idea. Again, The Terminator scenario of robots running in the streets shooting everybody. I’m more worried about AI accumulating more and more power and basically taking over society, taking over our lives, taking power away from us until we don’t understand what is happening and we lose control of our lives and of the future. The two most important things to realize about AI; you know, so many things are being said now about AI, but I think there are two things that every person should know about AI. First is that AI is the first tool in history that can make decisions by itself. All previous tools in history couldn’t make decisions. This is why they empowered us. You invent a knife, you invent an atom bomb; the atom bomb cannot decide to start a war, cannot decide which city to bomb. AI can make decisions by itself. Autonomous weapon systems can decide by themselves who to kill, who to bomb. The second thing is that AI is the first tool in history that can create new ideas by itself. The printing press could print our ideas, but could not create new ideas. AI can create new ideas entirely by itself. This is unprecedented. Therefore, it is the first technology in history that instead of giving power to humans, it takes power away from us. And the danger is that it will increasingly take more and more power from us until we are left helpless and clueless about what is happening in the world. And this is already beginning to happen in an accelerated pace. More and more decisions about our lives, whether to give us a loan, whether to give us a mortgage, whether to give us a job are taken by AI, and more and more of the ideas, of the images, of the stories that surround us and shape our minds, our world are produced, are created by AI, not by human beings. If you can just linger on that, what is the danger of that? That more and more of the creative side is done by AI? The idea generation? Is it that we become stale in our thinking? Is it that that idea generation is so fundamental to the evolution of humanity?…

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