This is a fact of nature. God has done this. Or the creator or whoever you want it to be. This is Mother Nature. And so, inevitably, it’s just knowledge about nature. It’s going to happen. There’s no hiding it. We don’t own it. We didn’t create it. They viewed it as that. In other words, they felt they were just revealing something that was already there. And I think you’d be very hard-pressed to make that argument about AI. I mean, I’m sure some will
If we endorse the view that AI is all-powerful, we are endorsing the view that it can alleviate people of responsibility for their actions—militarily, socioeconomically, whatever. The biggest danger of AI is that we attribute these godlike characteristics to it and therefore let ourselves off the hook. I don’t know what the mythological underpinnings of this are, but throughout history there’s this tendency of human beings to create false idols, to mold something in our own image and then say we’ve got godlike powers because we did
It is, but I’m less—I feel that AI can still be a very powerful tool for us. I’m optimistic about that. I really am. But we have to view it as a tool. The person who wields it still has to maintain responsibility for wielding that tool. If we accord AI the status of a human being, the way at some point legally we did with corporations, then yes, we’re going to have huge problems
Like if we do a stunt, a hazardous stunt. You could do it with much more visible wires, and then you just paint out the wires. Things like that. It’ll improve the ease and efficiency of visual effects, you’re saying. It’s not starting from nothing. It’s starting from a much more detailed and data-driven idea
Have your kids seen it? Had they known anything about Oppenheimer before? I told one of my sons about it as I started to write it, and he literally said to me: But nobody really worries about that anymore. Nuclear weapons. Two years later, he’s not saying that. The world’s changed again. And that’s a lesson for all of us, but particularly for the young. The world changes fast
