World Economic Forum futurist Yuval Noah Harari sat for a friendly interview with journalist Pedro Pinto. None of Yuval’s despotic aspirations as the right-hand man to the world’s leading technocrat, Klaus Schwab, came up. But his lustful enthusiasm for AI and its social control possibilities did, which he unabashedly shared with the world.
It’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas.
You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind. They cannot create a new idea. You know, [Johannes] 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, but it did not create a single new page. It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?”
AI can create new ideas. It can even write a new Bible.
AI, in the technocrats’ vision, will be fully responsible for generating and propagating values, norms, and mores that shape human morality. This used to occur organically — some would say guided by a higher power — at the cultural level among humans.
Functionally, AI will fill the role that God has filled, in various forms in various cultures throughout history. That’s what Harari is really saying in the subtext of his comments above: God is Dead, and he has version 2.0 to offer the world, minus the benevolent generosity of spirit.
In fact, as I previously reported in the context of transgenderism, Harari has explicitly parroted that Nietzschean quote, saying that “God is dead — it’s just taking a while to get rid of the body.”
Related: Trust the Artificial Intelligence, Part One
If morally compromised humans program AI, which has no conscience itself, why should AI be expected to act any more morally than its creators? The 20th century saw the horrors, facilitated by technology, that could be unleashed on the world by totalitarian despots full of delusions of grandeur. They were horrific parasites on the human race, but they were, at least, human. If nothing else, they were constrained by the limits of the biological meat suit they were born into.
AI, in the very near future, will possess exponentially greater computing power than man with no ties to bind it to humanity and to constrain its worse impulses. Plus, “AI never needs to rest,” as Harai notes.
Yuval Noah Harari has repeatedly heralded the end of humanity’s relevance in the future dystopia, as man will be inevitably replaced with machine:
People realize — and they’re correct in thinking that — that, ‘The future doesn’t need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and in global connectivity and whatnot, and they don’t need me…
Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering.
People like Harari, pure materialists, view the human being as simply another tool that will ultimately be rendered obsolete as a new, sleeker, faster, stronger, less fragile replacement comes along comprised of rare Earth minerals rather than organic compounds.
