Musk, Harari, and AI

By Bill Muehlenberg - Posted at Culture Watch:

Published January 16, 2025

The age of transhumanism is now upon us:

The world of AI is now fully part of our lives, and whether it becomes our ruin or our salvation remains to be seen, but many, including myself, tend to back the former option. It is developing at exponential rates, and it seems there will be no stopping it. A piece penned 10 months ago might already be obsolete, but it tells us of the exceedingly rapid pace of things:

"Jensen Huang, the CEO of tech titan Nvidia, has a message for the world about artificial intelligence: You ain’t seen nothing yet. Speaking to a standing room-only audience at the 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit, Huang predicted that in as little as five years AI will be able to pass every test a human takes — not just the legal bar exams that it can complete today, but also highly specialized medical licensing exams.

"In about 10 years, he said, the computational capabilities of AI systems will be a million times bigger than they are today. Systems synthetically generating data will have greater capacity to continuously learn, infer, and imagine. Instead of only instantly answering questions, forthcoming AI systems will also have the ability to think critically through problems over longer periods of time.

“In the future, the way you interact with AI will be very different” from what can be done with ChatGPT and other AI models today, said Huang. https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/nvidias-jensen-huang-incredible-future-ai

And AI is part of the bigger (and badder) world of transhumanism and the like. All this is making brave new world scenarios a present-day reality, not a potential future worry. As such, there is now a regular supply of books coming out on these topics. Last year I discussed 22 such volumes: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/02/27/top-22-books-on-transhumanism-ai-and-the-new-technologies/

I will soon add another 18 books to that list, again briefly annotating each volume. But one excellent volume is worth highlighting now. I refer to Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity by Joe Allen (War Room Books, 2023). Allen knows his stuff, and he is a clever writer to boot.

In some 500 pages he offers us a comprehensive and detailed examination of the AI world we are now becoming, for good or ill. And given that Elon Musk and Yuval Noah Harari are such major players in all this, it is not surprising that Allen spends a fair amount of time discussing each one. Chapter 7, “Homo Deus – A Man of Wealth and Taste” discusses in detail both Harari and Musk.

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See also:

• What Is Transhumanism? (HLI)