19: Kapil Sharma

Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared. .......... “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things” .......... real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. ......... Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. .......... They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding. ........

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.

.............. democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.

Review: ‘Homo Deus’ Foresees a Godlike Future. (Ignore the Techno-Overlords.) the thought-leader industrial complex .......... Bill Gates told The New York Times it would be one of the 10 books he’d bring to a desert island — and why ever not? If you’re going to be Tom Hanks, your volleyball might as well be a breezy history of your missing fellow humans. ......... “The future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals,” he wrote. “Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.” ........... “For the first time in history,” Harari writes, “more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined.” ............. Eternal happiness. Everlasting life. “In seeking bliss and immortality,” he writes, “humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods.” ........... If you’re acquainted with the story of Icarus, you know that these prideful efforts don’t tend to end well. Harari imagines that in attempting to refine ourselves to utter perfection — the logical apotheosis of humanism, whose history and evolution he traces over many pages — we will destroy humanism itself. ........ “Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons,” he points out, “were enough to transform Homo erectus — who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives — into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers.” Why should we assume that Sapiens are the end of the evolutionary line? .......... A small, breakaway republic of superhumans and techno-elites will eventually split off from the rest of humanity. Those who acquire the skills and proprietary algorithms to re-engineer brains, bodies and minds — the main products of the 21st century, Harari suspects — will become gods; those who don’t will be rendered economically useless and die off. ............. The nanobots in our bodies tracking cancer could be hacked by North Koreans and start doing lord knows what. “Once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence,” Harari writes, “it might simply exterminate mankind.” ........... A world run by strongmen and kleptocrats is nothing compared with a world run by robot overlords. Governments in that situation would be much less powerful than Google. .......... “If your CT indicates you have cancer, would you prefer to receive the news from a cold machine, or from a human doctor attentive to your emotional state?” he asks. “Well, how about receiving the news from an attentive machine that tailors its words to your feelings and personality type?”

Kimmel Takes Stock of Trump’s Rhetoric After Suspect’s Arrest Jimmy Kimmel said the former president, who blamed Democrats for “highly inflammatory language,” was himself “not a calming influence.” .........