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Harari on AI and the future of humanity


I have seen a few discussions and lectures from Harari on the subject of AI, this though may be the best so far. The questions are pointed, which certainly helps. Harari tends to bring a different perspective to the debate on AI safety, which is of value. It's well worth watching the whole video, below is a snippet. 


Harari: So, we need to know three things about AI. First of all, AI is still just a tiny baby. We haven't seen anything yet. Real AI, deployed into the world, not in a laboratory or in science fiction, is only about 10 years old.

If you look at the wonderful scenery outside, with all the plants and trees, and think about biological evolution, the evolution of life on Earth took something like 4 billion years. It took 4 billion years to reach these plants and to reach us, human beings.

Now, AI is at the stage of, I don't know, amoebas. It's like 4 billion years ago, and the first living organisms are crawling out of the organic soup. ChatGPT and all these wonders are the amoebas of the AI world.

What would a T-Rex look like, and how long would it take for the AI amoebas to evolve into T-Rexes? It won't take billions of years. Maybe it will only take a few decades or a few years.

That's because the evolution of AI is on a completely different timescale than the evolution of organic beings. AI itself works on a different timescale. AI is always on. Computers in general are always on. Humans and other organic organisms live, exist, and develop in cycles. We need to rest sometimes. AI never needs to rest.

Now, the other two things we need to know about AI are that:

It is the first technology ever that can make decisions by itself.

I hear a lot of people saying, "Oh, all these worries about AI. Every time there is a new technology, people worry about it, and afterwards it's okay. Like when people invented writing, printing presses, and airplanes, they were so worried, and in the end it was okay. This will be the same."

But it's not the same. No previous technology in history could make decisions. Even an atom bomb actually empowered humans, because an atom bomb can destroy a city, but it cannot decide which city to bomb. You always need a human to make that decision. AI is the first technology that can make decisions by itself, even about us.

Increasingly, when we apply to a bank for a loan, it is an AI that makes the decision about us. So it takes power away from us.

AI is the first technology ever that can create new ideas.

The printing press, radio, and television broadcast and spread ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind. They cannot create a new idea. For example, Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century. The printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it to, but it did not create a single new page. It had no ideas of its own about the Bible, such as whether it is good or bad, or how to interpret it.

AI can create new ideas, and can even write a new Bible. Throughout history, religions have dreamed about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity. Every religion claims that its book is the only true book, and that all the other books are written by humans, but our book is different. Our book came from some superhuman intelligence.

In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct. Just think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI. That could be a reality in a few years.


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