Yuval Noah Harari and Yoshua Bengio on the Future of AI and Humanity

This is the summary, insight, and analysis of the Yuval Noah Harari and Yoshua Bengio interview on AI. They comment on the questions about what to expect and what actions to take to shape the inevitable AI future.

The AI revolution is here and it will be more consequential than most others either improving our lives immensely or having catastrophic consequences since we have currently no control over its future.

The former, Yuval Noah Harari, is a world-renowned philosopher and historian who became world-famous starting with his book, Sapiens.

The latter, Yoshua Bengio, is known as one of the Godfathers of AI.

In the 40-minute interview, Yuval believes we need to immediately start regulating and putting guardrails around the development of AI as we do to money or other developments that have deep impacts on human life.

Now, there is almost none.

Yuval uses the analogy of money. Counterfeiting money is banned and has extremely harsh punishments like 20 years in prison, however, AI doesn’t have such a penalty now.

Secondly, there are no rules for making AI available in the public sphere like the other fields. Companies can now make AI apps and businesses immediately available as soon as they launch it without any monitoring or permit by a government or globally recognized central control unit.

According to Yoshua Bengio; now AI is completely developed and managed by pure capitalism and the greed of making billions for a few can be catastrophic for humanity if government regulation isn’t put into place.

He also believes that a superintelligence that is far more intelligent than humans cannot be controlled if monitoring isn’t made from the early phases.

Bengio makes a frog and human analogy and that a super intelligent sentient being can see us as frogs and we know how we treat frogs.