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Human Evolution According to Larry Page

Page is worth $120 billion. He is co-founder if Google, former manager of Alphabet and currently controlling shareholder.

Nick Bilton: Larry Page was talking about the progression of technology and how it was inevitable that humans would eventually create “superintelligent machines,” also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), which are computers that are smarter than humans, and in Page’s view, once that happened, those machines would quickly find no use for us humans, and they would simply get rid of us.

“What do you mean, get rid of us?” my friend asked Page.

Like a sci-fi writer delivering a pitch for their new apocalyptic story idea, Page explained that these robots would become far superior to us very quickly, and if we were no longer needed on earth and that’s the natural order of things—and I quote—“it’s just the next step in evolution.” At first my friend assumed Page was joking. “I’m serious,” said Page. When my friend argued that this was a really fucked up way of thinking about the world, Page grew annoyed and accused him of being “specist.”

Let’s just stop for a moment and unpack this. Larry Page…the founder of one of the world’s biggest companies…a company that employs thousands of engineers that are building artificial intelligence machines right now, as you read this…believes that AI will, and should, become so smart and so powerful and so formidable and…and…that one day it won’t need us dumb pathetic little humans anymore…and it will, and it should, GET RID OF US!

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