"This really is a watershed moment in our existence on the planet. I think it's dramatic and I'll be upfront about the fact that I used to be very much an AI skeptic, because I went into cognitive science." "I don't know whether you're another human being like I am my working assumption is that you're something like me," he says of his work with artificial neural networks. 'We could control it very well. But our ability to make intelligence has so drastically outstripped our understanding of things like minds or consciousness'
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.