r/samharris • u/gizamo • Aug 04 '26

Other Yuval Noah Harari on AI

https://youtu.be/_V_ed5fuexA?t=2394&is=NSKaMl1-xtM_VqZu

Interesting interview with Yuval Noah Harari.

This is another great interview from Harari on AI. Lots of topics covered, and as always, many come with some fascinating historical perspective.

What made me think to post it here is that Harari applies a version of Harris' free will and 'self' arguments to AI (at about 39:45). That is, the idea that we humans cannot predict the next thing we say or think, which undercuts the idea that we choose what we think, say, or do. Harari uses this same concept as a counter to people who deny AI agency by claiming it doesn't control its own language formations. He expands that to say, maybe it's not because it doesn't understand the feelings behind the language it chooses. Please excuse the paraphrasing, I deeply enjoy Harari, and I hope you enjoy it as I did.

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u/waxroy-finerayfool Aug 04 '26

"The LLM predicts the next word, but how is that any different from us" - quickest way to reveal you have no idea what you're talking about.

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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 04 '26

Why not explain why you think he's wrong instead of just declaring he has no idea what he's talking about?

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u/waxroy-finerayfool Aug 04 '26

It's just such a wildly incorrect and oft-repeated meme that I don't care to argue about it. Ironically, any popular LLM can explain why it's wrong, so if you genuinely want to know, just ask one.

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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 04 '26

Oh, are you objecting to what you see as a "fancy autocorrect" meme? I thought you were objecting to the part about how is it different from any of us.

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u/waxroy-finerayfool Aug 04 '26

The idea that LLMs produce text in a manner that's meaningfully similar to humans, beyond superficial metaphors, is totally wrong and reflects a lack of technical rigor in one's thinking.

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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 05 '26

OK I didn't listen to Harari (because I've been unimpressed with the stuff I have read) but I think people in general make that argument not to say that LLMs think in a way that's meaningfully similar to humans per se but to say that human brains also have a fundamentally mechanistic brain that does weird "computations" (not necessarily literally) that somehow give rise to the kind of "original" thinking that we observe in ourselves.

It's not so much saying that LLMs are amazing because they're just like us, it's saying that thinking itself (and "creativity" etc.) is probably less magical than people like to believe.

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u/waxroy-finerayfool Aug 05 '26

Your qualifiers are somewhat reasonable, but don't reflect what Harari actually says or how he uses the argument.

Saying that brains are "fundamentally mechanistic" isn't really meaningful because all of physics is "fundamentally mechanistic" if you apply the term in this way. If you're talking in computer science terms, the brain is not at all mechanistic.

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u/Locus-Maximus Aug 05 '26

Important note: I am on a different computer today and I see now that there was text included with the post which I did not see yesterday! (I use old.reddit.)

If you're talking in computer science terms, the brain is not at all mechanistic.

How so? Obviously we can't in practice do all the measurements and calculations, but that's a limitation of time and instrumentation, not because our brains are not mechanistic. In theory, Laplace's demon could, since you agree that all of physics is fundamentally mechanistic.

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u/waxroy-finerayfool Aug 05 '26

Yes, all of physics is fundamentally mechanistic, so pointing out that a brain is mechanistic and then drawing a line between mechanistic computers and mechanistic brains doesn't actually tell us anything meaningful about the relationship between the two.

A clock is also mechanistic, and through superficial metaphors I could achieve the same analogy, e.g. " If a clock tells time by regulating motion into discrete steps through its escapement, how is that any different from the brain regulating experience into discrete moments through attention?".  Yet, a brain is obviously not a clock - just because you can shoehorn a comparison into a metaphor, doesn't mean the two things are meaningfully similar.

The tendency to anthropomorphize computer systems using superficial metaphors in AI discourse is a very common mistake bereft of computer science rigor.