Can Humanism Survive the Age of AI? | The Reith Lectures

by semaayildizz

Since 1750, we've been living through

the Great Acceleration. Energy use,

population, and emissions have all

followed an exponential curve.

We are reshaping the Earth at breakneck

speed.

And yet, beneath it all, we remain the

same old species.

We are apes with god-like powers. Which

brings me to the third question.

Where are we going? Ask the CEOs of the

big tech companies, and they'll tell you

that the rise of artificial intelligence

is a hundred times bigger than the

Industrial Revolution. That this may be

the last invention we'll ever make.

We are currently in a race [music] to

create alien minds. Systems that we do

not understand and that we may not be

able to control.

They are not designed

so much as summoned into being.

And so we must ask,

will this be the new worst mistake in

the history of the human race?

Hello. I'm Rutger Bregman. My fourth and

final BBC Reith Lecture is by far my

most personal.

I'm going to talk about my own

philosophical journey and outline my

fears for the future. And I warn that

Big Tech is now out of control and

threatening our very humanity. I've

called it Fighting for Humanity in the

age of the machine.

When I was 15 years old, I thought I had

made a monumental philosophical

discovery.

Late at night, hunched over my old

Pentium 4 computer, I wrote my first