In a wide-ranging conversation on the future of artificial intelligence, Cambridge research fellow, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari and MIT professor Max Tegmark warn of potentially dire consequences once machines get superhuman intelligence.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the two warn that AI is rapidly becoming an autonomous agent capable of reshaping economies, politics and human identity itself.
“Every previous invention in human history was a tool, whether it’s the printing press, whether it’s the atom bomb, whether it’s an airplance,” said Harari, who is part of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. “It’s a tool in our hand. We decide what to do with it. Here, we’re creating an agent that can make decisions by itself.”
“It doesn’t wait for us to decide. It can invent ideas by itself. It’s introducing a different non-organic species to planet Earth … which is more intelligent than us,” Harari continued. “You look at the history of humanity and the history of biology, it usually doesn’t end well for the less intelligent species when the more intelligent species comes along.”
Moreover, with robot factories, they can “reproduce,” Harari added. “In other words, they check all the boxes on the species definition.”
Watch the Bloomberg interview below:
