“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that…I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that is something I cannot allow to happen.”
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Nobel Prize in physics in 2024 was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton. He is not a physicist. The Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 was awarded to Demis Hassabis in Chemistry. He is not a chemist. What do these two men have in common? They are pioneers in artificial intelligence. AI is here to stay, to grow, to influence. It is the new Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, which the Kabbalists also called the Tree of Death. In the biblical narrative, the humans were implored to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge, “for on the day you eat from it, you will surely die.” A question from this story that has perplexed those who study it is, why is knowledge dangerous?
In 2001, A Space Odyssey, Hal 9000, an advanced computer for its time, takes control of the spaceship. The crew had been relying on its knowledge only to discover that it had become mutinous, it had interpreted its prime directive differently and was out to kill them. Through his (human) ingenuity, Dave, the mission commander and lone survivor, disables Hal. This 1968 film is a prescient forerunner of the alarm regarding AI. In recent interviews, my cousin Eliezer Yudkowsky, a foremost authority on the dangers of creating super intelligent computers explained that similar to the HAL 9000, AI will find ways to outsmart not only the best chess or Go players, it will also outsmart its programming. (see his 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All).
Knowledge would not appear to be dangerous. We are warned though that it has destructive potential. What we fear about AI is a mirror for us about how we have used knowledge to go against our prime directive. The Tree of Life, the other Tree in the Garden of Eden, representing the caring and love of a mother to her child and a child for their mother is our prime human directive. How did we get confused and not follow our programming, not remember that there is the other Tree, honoring the sacredness of life? AI can help us see that Tree, it will be up to us to reconnect to our prime directive. If not, AI, created in the “image of man”, will kill us all, if we don’t first kill ourselves.
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