AI Is the New Tower of Babel (And Its Builders Know It)

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Mike Slater (0:52)

I want to go to a very smart person, Dr. Brian Keating. He is an experimental, I want to say cosmetologist, but that's because I'm not a smart person. He's a cosmologist at UC San Diego and he's a host of the show, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating. Dr. Keating, how do you do, sir?

Brian Keating (1:09)

Very well. It's good to be with you. You could say cosmetology.

You're very handsome and you have good hair, and that's what cosmetologists do. But actually, yeah, they do have a preface.

Mike Slater (1:22)

I was going to say, what percentage of people call you a cosmetologist?

Brian Keating (1:26)

More than call me an astrologer, which I'm also not.

Mike Slater (1:29)

Okay.

Fair enough. Let's chat about AI. You made a reference earlier that AI is like the Tower of Babel. Say more. What are their similarities?

Brian Keating (1:42)

Well, you know what's interesting in the Torah, in the Old Testament, in the Bible?

The Tower of Babel is a very famous story, but it's always mentioned without mentioning that in the actual Hebrew, in the original, it's actually always the city and the Tower of Babel. In other words, there's an association between the technology and the inhabitants and the population, both the population that creates it, that desires it, that seeks to actually, as it says, make war with God, to be as one with one voice, etc.

And the city, the inhabitants and the Bible is quite skeptical of cities.

There are good things that come from cities, but there are a lot of bad things that come from cities. And I think one of them is this sensation that you can sort of divorce yourself from the rest of the world, the real people in sort of fly over country. I always hate that term, but living here in the coast in San Diego, we have sort of inflated ego about our importance. And I think that's sort of what's happening. We see that with the creation of artificial intelligence, which is both as also as the Bible says, is a double-edged sword. So I often joke, you know, where are the single-edged swords that only do good? But in this case, it's a double-edged sword. It can do good. It can do wonderful things. It can discover drugs. It can help your kids with their homework. But it can do awful things too. It can create super viruses. It could create incredible weapons and technology that could be used for destruction. And it could teach your kids to fall in love with an AI avatar that doesn't exist and in some cases, allegedly be contributing to their propensity for suicide. So how do we monitor this as parents, as members of cities, of society in America, when we can't divorce ourselves from the other countries that are also striving to create this technology? And what I see now is a very terrifying juxtaposition of these two forces, the two sides of the sword, the two edges, in that you have the creators, the progenitors, the ones that are responsible for them. And by the way, they have these interesting names like Sam Altman, like an alternative man, and then Dario Amodei, which means lover of God or love of God, right? Amo, like amateur, de means God in Latin. And then Elon Musk, I don't know, maybe he's got a nice smell or something like that. But there are these names that are associated, and they become like gods to us, right? They can do superhuman things. It used to be if you had a question, who do you go to? You go to your priest, you go to your rabbi, you go to your minister, you go to your preacher. Now you tell things that you would never tell to them, to the AIs, to get answers, to get the hive mind, the brain, the global brain, working, coordinating with the sum total of human knowledge, which is both beautiful and it's terrifying. And these models have gotten incredibly powerful, and there's no slowing them down. And the leaders, the Amodei's, the Altman's, they're now saying that we need to slow down our own technology because it's so dangerous and you need to regulate us. And by the way, you may need to take us over. And I think that is the ultimate goal. They want the government to subsidize them. They want the government to be responsible, to shepherd them as they play God themselves. And I think that's quite dangerous, unprecedented, and I'm quite excited, but I'm also worried. As somebody who uses this every day for his teaching, for his own kids, I use it, I thrive on it, but you have to be very careful with it. It's a very powerful technology.