Peter Thiel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Thanks. Question about AI and theology. Voltaire had this great quote: “If God didn’t exist, we would need to invent him,” or her, or whatever the pronoun is. Do you find this view of super-intelligent AI, which might be in the near future, as a kind of deity, as a kind of machine God? Is that useful? Is there leverage to that? And could it even be more than just a heuristic, some kind of substantive statement? It’s sort of a purely theological question. I want to focus more on the political theology question, which would be something like, if it’s a centralizing AI that’s controlled by communist China, will it just be very good at convincing people that the party is God? Or that the wisdom of crowds, or whatever the consensus is, is the truth? Then, yes, there are these metaphysical questions, where it doesn’t seem like it’s exactly — I don’t know — a transcendent, traditional, monotheistic God. I would go to more the political questions than the metaphysical ones. Probably, the risk danger is that there’s something about it that telescopes even more the consensus, truth, wisdom of crowds. I think probably all the models will tell you that there’s no particular religion that’s more true than any other one. Then is that really what the models generate, or has that been hardwired in? Those are the questions I’d be more curious about. Thank you all for listening to Conversations with Tyler at the Mercatus Center. Most of all, thank you, Peter Thiel.…

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