“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.” – Yuval Noah Harari
LEX. 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 that that idea generation is so fundamental to like the evolution of humanity? – That we can’t resist the ideas. To resist an idea, you need to have some vision of the creative process.
YUVAL. Yeah. – Now this is a very old fear. You go back to Plato’s cave, so this idea this idea that people are sitting chained in a cave and seeing shadows on a screen, on a wall, and thinking this is reality. You go back to Descartes and he has this thought experiment of the demon. And Descartes asks himself, how do I know that any of this is real? Maybe there is a demon who is creating all of this and is basically enslaving me by surrounding me with these illusions. You go back to Buddha, it’s the same question. What if we are living in a world of illusions, and because we have been living in it throughout our lives, all our ideas, all our desires, how we understand ourself, this is all the product of the same illusions. And this was a big philosophical question for thousands of years. Now it’s becoming a practical question of engineering, because previously all the ideas, as far as we know, maybe we are living inside a computer simulation of intelligent rats from the planet Zerco. If that’s the case, we don’t know about it. But taking what we do know about human history until now, all the, again, stories, images, paintings, songs, operas, theater, everything we’ve encountered and shaped our minds was created by humans. Now increasingly we live in a world where more and more of these cultural artifacts will be coming from an alien intelligence. Very quickly we might reach a point when most of the story stories, images, songs, TV shows, whatever, are created by an alien intelligence. And if we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions, created by an alien intelligence that we don’t understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of, you know, spiritual enslavement that we won’t be able to break out of because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don’t understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. – So if there’s a set of AI systems that are operating in the space of ideas that are far superior to ours and we’re not almost able to, it’s opaque to us, we’re not able to see through, how does that change the pursuit of happiness, the human pursuit of happiness? Life. Where do we get joy if we’re surrounded by AI systems that are doing most of the cool things humans do much better than us?”