Yuval Noah

tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology

never summon powers you cannot control.

Today one might hope that AI could provide such a mechanism, as when in April 2023 Elon Musk announced, “I’m going to start something, which I call TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”[2] We will see in later chapters why this is a dangerous fantasy. In previous eras, such fantasies took a different form—religion.