Yuval Noah Harari: AI – Special Edition Post

I saw the above presentation last night by Yuval Noah Harari that was part of the Frontiers Forum Live event held in April 2023. He said the following points at this event, but I’ll also add below what I wrote in my March – Chat GPT 4.0 article which correlate with his:

Harari – Even the developers of these tools don’t know the full capabilities of what they have created, and they are themselves often surprised by emergent abilities and emergent qualities of these tools.

My article – …most strikingly it appears now that experts of this AI can’t ascertain how it could realize its deductive reasoning to achieve such extraordinary output.

To put this into perspective, according to Bret’s comments and reflections about the findings of the paper Bubeck et al 2023. Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 this is a first in Artificial Intelligence advancement; specifically, how experts, or even the AI creators don’t know how this Intelligence deducted its reasoning to outperform humans.

Harari – But there are many additional capabilities that are emerging, like deep faking people’s voices and images, like drafting bills, finding weaknesses both in computer code and also in legal contracts and in legal agreements, but perhaps most importantly, the new AI tools are gaining the ability to develop deep and intimate relationships with human beings.

My article – AI has got so advanced that it may be impossible for humans to discern whether or not videos / pictures are real as seen already in many tic-toc and facebook snippets ..I recently wrote an article called Joe Biden AI Voice Speech where Bruce my New Zealand amigo chimed ‘I don’t believe it was edited at all‘ (a bit tongue in cheek). From here on it will get worse. We might never be able to trust our own senses about what is real, as alluded to by Joe Rogan in that article.
Also, I point y’all to my article on the movie: Ex Machina for more stimuli on this topic.

Harari – Already today in games like chess no human can hope to beat a computer. What if the same thing happened in art, in politics, economics and even in religion?

My article – I remember watching the documentary Game Over (2003) when World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov played a chess match against IBM’s computer Deep Blue in 1997. He lost the match. Now it’s a given that even the best Chess players in the world including Magnus Carlsen can’t hold a candle to Artificial Intelligence game – play.

Harari – When people think about Chat GPT and the other other new AI tools they are often drawn to examples like kids using chat GPT to write those school essays. What will happen to the school system? But this kind of question misses the big picture.

My article – On an individual level, Meritocracy could be dead in little time. The average C plus student with a bent on such technology could subtly acquire the skills to allow the technology to write their answers for them, but not in a way that makes him or her a plagiarist, but a student advancing. And in their subsequent correspondence appear a struggling but agreeable student worthy of support.

Harari – Forget about school essays, think for example about the next US presidential race in 2024. And try to imagine the impact of the new AI tools that can mass produce political manifestos, fake news stories….

My article – Even on a collectivist level; a Regime or Government could learn to harness such technology to implement the policies as advocated by the program (the part of the Overton window in policy range) to win more votes in the subsequent election. On a local level instead of having ‘focus groups‘, this AI could do the focusing for them and arrive at outcomes better than they intended, because, to put it frankly, the AI knows what is assured to succeed.

I recommend you watch the rest of the presentation since Yuval Noah Harari explores areas about AI which I hadn’t considered. This Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem knows his stuff!

Previously most people have feared the physical threat that intelligent machines pose. The Terminator..The Matrix assumed to gain total control of human society, AI would first need to get physical control of our brains and directly connect our brains to the computer network. But this is wrong. Simply by gaining mastery of human language which AI has – all it needs in order to cocoon us is a Matrix like world of illusions.

– Yuval Noah Harari April 2023