Bill Maher closed out Friday’s “Real Time” with a dire warning about artificial intelligence, noting just how ominous its progression has been and asking why we’re even building a “super intelligence that can outthink us” — before addressing “another scary thing” about it.
“The people who run it, i.e., the people who run the world,” said Maher. “And it’s like five guys. Five guys who, between them and working as a team, couldn’t correctly read a social cue. I wouldn’t let these guys around a mixed drink, let alone my personal data.”
He said, “So, just to be clear, what we’re doing here, we’re letting a handful of hoodie-wearing, on-the-spectrum sociopaths, practically robots themselves, roll the dice on species extinction. You see an out-of-control robot and you run.”
Then came the punchline: “Mark Zuckerberg sees one and thinks, ‘Dad?’”
Photos on screen identified the five people in question as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, X CEO Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, who runs Meta. Maher spent his entire “New Rules” segment on their work.
