Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images via AFP
- Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says he’s skeptical of AI “doomerism” scenarios.
- And he says those who believe in them are trying to fill a “God-shaped hole in their heart.”
- “The people who have religion are the most skeptical of this,” Sankar said.
A top executive at Palantir says he’s “super skeptical” that AI will be catastrophic for humanity — and he says those fears are in part driven by a lack of religion.
“I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI,” Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said in an interview with the New York Times’s Ross Douthat. “It’s like, OK, the models get better. Why do you think that this cliff is going to happen where they somehow turn us into house cats?”
“The people who have religion are the most skeptical of this,” Sankar added. “The people who are transhumanists — it becomes what they wish were true, and then they run around with the doomerism.”
“Doomerism” refers to the idea that AI will cause a catastrophic scenario, such as mass unemployment or extinction.
Sankar made the comments as Douthat asked him whether Palantir and other companies were aiming to build forms of artificial intelligence for the military that could replace human decision-making.
“I just don’t think it would work the way that people think it would work in the Terminator nightmare scenario,” Sankar said, saying that integrating AI into military technology brings “more of a difference of degree than kind.”
He also said that doomerism is a “fundraising shtick” where companies on the front lines of AI development “can say ‘my technology is so powerful, it’s going to lead to mass unemployment, so you better invest in me or you’re going to be poor.'”
“They are sitting in Silicon Valley, building these models, spending no time on the front lines of how are people using this,” Sankar said. “When you see it intersect the front line, it’s actually empowering the worker to do more.”
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