This one caught me off guard. "If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there." He's a student of Buddhism, he must know the veil is one of the five hindrances to awakening. Good luck throwing that off in this life or any other. I really like Harari's work, but I think I've got to disagree with some of his hot takes on A.I. Thanks for sharing, great article!
"And even those dark times were probably better than 150 thousand years ago, when, limited to pointing and grunting, we couldn’t lie at all."
I know this is just a throwaway line, but whoa, a time before lying, talk about prelapsarian! But of course lying is possible even with only points and grunts. Anytime there's a signal there can be a false signal. Maybe lying implies conscious intent? We don't normally think of the cuckoo's egg as lying after all. But I mean honest to goodness real lying, and that it is far older part of our evolutionary history than walking upright.
How do I know that? I could be lying. I have come by this knowledge not in the normal manner of economists and theorists (that is, imagining what I would do if *I* were a caveman, and finding I could maximize my utility by lying), but rather, by reading empirical studies of an analogous case. That is, other apes and monkeys, all of whom have been documented lying! (cf. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.0544, but there are tons of these). Among the best studied are alarm calls in the wild, which monkeys and apes will consciously make to warn friends of approaching danger. But ALSO, they'll fake those cries to get friends to scatter, so they can get more foraging time themselves while their relatives run and hide. Never trust a hominid!
The amazing thing about this isn't the use of deliberate deception itself. The amazing thing is that language and communication as we know it was even able to evolve at all, when there's such a large payoff for betrayal. The costly signaling of honest communication is under constant assault by noise, and one of our main evolutionary superpowers appears to be a capacity for detecting the lying smiles of a cheat. Exactly to your point!
First of all, none of my lines are throwaway, Alexander. Each one is carefully hand-crafted to maximize engagement. However, your point is well taken. Yes, even pointing and grunting can be done deceitfully (or sarcastically, or facetiously). And, even earlier, we've got the deep fakes of camouflage, and whatever you call that thing where you evolve the spots of a venomous toad without bothering to evolve the venom.
> Never trust a hominid!
Or, more precisely, trust a hominid most of the time. As you say, it is amazing that the whole operation works at all. Somehow the benefits of coordinated action and the payoffs of non-zero-sum games create a kind of self-reinforcing drive towards truthfulness. It's almost enough to make one become a moral realist!
First of all, excellent article! This was what I've been looking for. <3
| Adding machine-generation into this mix is, in my view, mostly more of the same.
I would wholeheartedly agree with it all, if it weren't for one thing: what we will be dealing with is not a creative mind, but advanced automation. The problem isn't that fake news, and postings will be created by ai. Is that the speed, and the reach, will be tens of thousands times better. The bottleneck will be inexistent.
This one caught me off guard. "If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there." He's a student of Buddhism, he must know the veil is one of the five hindrances to awakening. Good luck throwing that off in this life or any other. I really like Harari's work, but I think I've got to disagree with some of his hot takes on A.I. Thanks for sharing, great article!
"And even those dark times were probably better than 150 thousand years ago, when, limited to pointing and grunting, we couldn’t lie at all."
I know this is just a throwaway line, but whoa, a time before lying, talk about prelapsarian! But of course lying is possible even with only points and grunts. Anytime there's a signal there can be a false signal. Maybe lying implies conscious intent? We don't normally think of the cuckoo's egg as lying after all. But I mean honest to goodness real lying, and that it is far older part of our evolutionary history than walking upright.
How do I know that? I could be lying. I have come by this knowledge not in the normal manner of economists and theorists (that is, imagining what I would do if *I* were a caveman, and finding I could maximize my utility by lying), but rather, by reading empirical studies of an analogous case. That is, other apes and monkeys, all of whom have been documented lying! (cf. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.0544, but there are tons of these). Among the best studied are alarm calls in the wild, which monkeys and apes will consciously make to warn friends of approaching danger. But ALSO, they'll fake those cries to get friends to scatter, so they can get more foraging time themselves while their relatives run and hide. Never trust a hominid!
The amazing thing about this isn't the use of deliberate deception itself. The amazing thing is that language and communication as we know it was even able to evolve at all, when there's such a large payoff for betrayal. The costly signaling of honest communication is under constant assault by noise, and one of our main evolutionary superpowers appears to be a capacity for detecting the lying smiles of a cheat. Exactly to your point!
First of all, none of my lines are throwaway, Alexander. Each one is carefully hand-crafted to maximize engagement. However, your point is well taken. Yes, even pointing and grunting can be done deceitfully (or sarcastically, or facetiously). And, even earlier, we've got the deep fakes of camouflage, and whatever you call that thing where you evolve the spots of a venomous toad without bothering to evolve the venom.
> Never trust a hominid!
Or, more precisely, trust a hominid most of the time. As you say, it is amazing that the whole operation works at all. Somehow the benefits of coordinated action and the payoffs of non-zero-sum games create a kind of self-reinforcing drive towards truthfulness. It's almost enough to make one become a moral realist!
First of all, excellent article! This was what I've been looking for. <3
| Adding machine-generation into this mix is, in my view, mostly more of the same.
I would wholeheartedly agree with it all, if it weren't for one thing: what we will be dealing with is not a creative mind, but advanced automation. The problem isn't that fake news, and postings will be created by ai. Is that the speed, and the reach, will be tens of thousands times better. The bottleneck will be inexistent.