“One of the most powerful forces in history actually is human stupidity.”
The one thing everybody needs to know about AI is that it’s the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and can create new ideas by itself. It’s often compared to previous technological breakthrough like the printing press or the atom bomb. It’s completely different. Printing presses could not decide what book to print. Atom bombs could not decide by themselves which cities to destroy. If you take all the printing presses in the world together they cannot come up with a single new sentence by themselves. An atom bomb cannot invent a new and even more powerful weapon. It’s not an artifact that we are creating it actually should stand for alien intelligence. It’s a new type of intelligent entity that acts increasingly independently of human thought and human volition. So we are bringing into our ecosystem, into our planet, a very powerful and alien type of intelligence that we don’t know how to control and this is extremely dangerous.
Brief But Spectacular is an Emmy-nominated interview series that airs weekly on PBS NewsHour. These short-form episodes present an in-depth look at a variety of compelling guests and ideas. Since 2015, the series has profiled over 300 subjects on a variety of topics, such as the healthcare crisis, immigration, mass incarceration, systemic racism, and mental illness. These powerful narratives put personal faces on complex issues and provide a window into the human condition. The intention of the series is to elicit empathy from the viewer by presenting original voices on universal subjects and inviting the audience to walk in someone else’s shoes.