Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. There's a kind of

history myth that sometimes gets promulgated in, I don't know, elementary schools maybe, or just folk tales we held each other.

According to which, when the first European explorers landed in the New World, the indigenous folks saw them and thought, oh my goodness, these are

gods coming to visit us, and we need to worship them and they're too powerful to deal with.

Turns out nothing like that is actually true. This is a story that the Europeans made up after the

fact to make themselves look good to justify some of

things that happened. Nowadays, we are being faced with a new set of visitors from another

world, namely artificial intelligences, whether it's large language models or some other kind

of constructed program that in many ways can act human, but has a different

set of capacities, and we're learning to deal with them. And unlike the myth of the European

explorers landing in the Western Hemisphere, today there are a bunch of people who quite literally, who are very

willing to say that these are gods coming to deal with us. I know there's also plenty of

skepticism out there, but there are people who think not only that AIs are going to be an

our human-level intelligence and agency, but well beyond that, superhuman,

godlike creatures that we're going to have to deal with. I am myself not of that opinion. I do

not think that that is actually what is going on. But just like the landing explorers, AIs do have

different capacities than we do. They're trained, of course,

they're designed, they're made to in many ways act very human, but they're really not. They're

thinking in a different way. They're capable of some things much better than we are,

in other things not nearly as good as we are. So how do we think about this world in which interacting with AIs, interacting

with computerized systems more broadly is going to be a crucially important part of how we live

our lives.

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