Eric Liu: I feel this pretty strongly myself. The human being strives to understand. We like to understand that where we live in. We want to matter. So you're the desire to expand it, to make it better and smarter. Just like we can't, it happens everywhere. It's the essence of human life over the last few hundred years. But if you go back to read your essay, it's a screed. It's a rant. And it's a rant that you justify because you think, perhaps, yeah, something like the future of the human race is at stake. You should take it very seriously.
They operate according to rules we can never fully understand. They can be unreliable, uncontrollable, and misaligned with human values. They're fast becoming as intelligent as humans--and they're exclusively in the hands of profit-seeking tech companies. "They," of course, are the latest versions of AI, which herald, according to neuroscientist and writer Erik Hoel, a species-level threat to humanity. Listen as he tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts why we need to treat AI as an existential threat.