Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…He’s saying fascism doesn’t go away. It comes back in many forms. There are always forces that could enslave or destroy mankind, and he worried — I’m speculating here — about his own regime’s embrace of the AI program. So, he’s like an early Eliezer. [laughs] Or a worrier about technology. I think his worries about the analogy he’s making there between fascism and technology, that they enslave us — I don’t think they enslave us the way our phones enslave us, but they have the potential to be a system. I think of the man of system, the Adam Smith quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, this idea that if you have a view of the world that you want to impose on the chessboard of the human experience, you’re going to do some bad things. I take it to be in that spirit. Note also the middle paragraph, where he’s talking about humans. He cites, first, childhood memories, and a bit later on, a mother’s tenderness, thoughts of death. The main themes of the novel are being echoed by this interlude, where he is contrasting humans to the machine. The machine, for him, eventually becomes all-powerful. It becomes a kind of god and can create humans in its image that are in a way superior, and I think he’s terrified by this.…

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