Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. Yeah. I mean, I think each time it does both things. Each time it does both good things and bad things. The more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes. Now, we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors, of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. When we look back we say, in the end, everything was okay, “Hey, we are here,” but the people for whom it wasn’t okay, they are just not here.…

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