I am a big fan of Yuval Noah Harari, I truly am, but I disagree with his approach.
To face the dangers of AI, his solution is to slow down.
My problem with that? It’s unrealistic. Whenever you decree that a technology has to be slowed down, it only favors the companies that are willing to flout the rules.
And don’t be fooled, there will always be ways to get around laws.
“Oh no, this is not AI, just a program that speaks.”
“Oh no, this will never be released in production, this is just research.”
Let me give you a real-world example.
Google is actually the brain behind ChatGPT.
You don’t believe me?
In 2017, Google released the research paper “Attention Is All You Need”. This paper introduced to the world the Transformer architecture, which OpenAI used to create ChatGPT.
I am exaggerating, you might say. Google only invented the underlying architecture, and OpenAI did everything else. Google should have built the full chatbot.
So why didn’t they do it?
Because Google put strong barriers to AI, internally. They had a strict code of conduct, not allowing AI to use the internet, banning discrimation, being extremely cautious in general.
In other words, Google slowed down.
But you know who did not slow down? OpenAI. The benevolent “Open”, non-profit organization. It moved fast and broke things. And when they saw they had a killer product, they changed their status so that they could actually make a profit (how convenient). They also kept their code closed-source, not open. But they kept their name. And they became billionaires.
That’s why I do not believe in the approach Yuval Noah Harari is proposing.
It’s easy to criticize, but what solutions do I bring?
I designed a new socioeconomic model, Ethical Capitalism, that aligns individual profits to the Common Good.
If Ethical Capitalism is implemented, the people have fundamental control over AI, because any company designing AI in a way that’s detrimental to the collective actually makes less money.
And call me cynical, but I believe in the power of profits to make corporations behave, and I have reservations about the weight of governments and public opinions.