'People will worship AI as a god,' Tucker Carlson warns in Joe Rogan interview

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In an interview with Joe Rogan released last week, political commentator Tucker Carlson warned that “people will worship AI as a god.”

His remark led to a discussion of evolution, which Rogan said he believes will lead to a superintelligent digital life that will far surpass humanity in intelligence.

“My belief is that biological intelligent life is essentially a caterpillar, and it's a caterpillar that’s making a cocoon, and it doesn’t even know why it’s doing it, it’s just doing it,” Rogan said. “And that cocoon is going to give birth to artificial life, digital life. It’s going to give birth to a new life form. I think we’re real close to that. I think we’re way closer to that than most people would want to admit.”

Rogan, who hosts the world’s most popular podcast, is not alone in his views on evolution and the future of “digital life.”

This is also the belief of many of the world’s top AI developers.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, an Israeli citizen, has said that “in the future, it will be obvious that the sole purpose of science was to build AGI,” and that “the long-term goal is to build AGI that loves people the way parents love their children.”

OpenAI is currently the world’s leading AI developer.

Google's Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil – a Jewish transhumanist whose ideas were recently discussed by Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk – wrote in his book The Singularity is Near that “we need a new religion,” and that “once we saturate the matter and energy in the universe with [machine] intelligence, it will ‘wake up,’ be conscious, and sublimely intelligent. That’s about as close to God as I can imagine.”

After Rogan shared his views with Tucker regarding the direction of AI, he made a similar point to that of Kurzweil – who was interviewed by Rogan last month – namely, that at a certain point Artificial Intelligence “essentially becomes a god.”

Tucker responded by arguing that even though machines may indeed surpass human brain capacity, that “doesn’t make it a god…it’s still something that people created.”

Tucker agreed that “there is a spiritual component here for sure – people will worship AI as a god.”

Arguing that AI likely “will get away from us” and that “we will be controlled by the thing that we made,” Tucker said the development of digital superintelligence should be stopped immediately.

“If it’s bad for people, we should strangle it in its crib, right now,” he said. “And why not just blow up the data centers? Why is that hard? If it’s actually going to become what you just described, which is a threat to people, humanity, life, then we have a moral obligation to murder it immediately. And since it’s not alive we don’t need to feel bad about that.”

“So I don’t know why we’re sitting back and allowing this to happen if we really believe it will extinguish the human race or enslave the human race,” Tucker concluded. “How can that be good?”