Making Sense - Sam Harris - #453 — AI and the New Face of Antisemitism

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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00:00:36.660 Well, I'm here with Judea Pearl. Judea, thanks for coming into the studio. Great to see you.

00:00:41.320 It's the second time, isn't it?

00:00:42.780 Yeah, I came to you last time.

00:00:44.480 Yeah, I was in your office.

00:00:46.540 UCLA, right?

00:00:47.100 I actually didn't look to see when that was, but that's a few years ago, certainly. That

00:00:51.680 might be.

00:00:52.380 That was for your book, The Book of Why.

00:00:54.360 The Book of Why.

00:00:55.000 Which kind of wraps up for a popular audience all of your work on causality and logic of

00:01:01.600 that, which we'll touch briefly, because I have to ask you about AI, given that you're

00:01:05.860 one of the fathers of the field, but that's not really our agenda today, but we'll start

00:01:10.760 near there. But I want to talk to you about your new book. You have a new book, Coexistence

00:01:17.560 and Other Fighting Words, which I'm sorry to say I have not yet read, but that will give

00:01:23.300 you the ability to say anything to a naive audience on this topic. I'm sure it covers

00:01:29.540 much of the ground I want to cover with you, because I'm, like you, I think, very concerned

00:01:34.400 about cultural issues and the way that we've seen a rise of anti-Semitism on both the left

00:01:40.720 and the right. And we're now seeing the condition of Israel as a near pariah state on the world 0.85

00:01:48.260 stage. Briefly, let's start with your background. Where were you born and what did your parents

00:01:53.460 do?

00:01:53.660 Well, I was born in a little town called Bnei Brak, which is seven and a half miles north

00:02:00.100 of Tel Aviv. And it was established in 1924 by my grandfather, Chaim Pearl, with 25 other

00:02:09.900 Hasidic families who came from Poland and decided that it's time to go back to where they belong. 1.00

00:02:17.560 So when did they move to Israel, your parents?

00:02:19.720 In 1924. My father, my father family came in 1924.

00:02:23.920 And when were you born?

00:02:24.960 In 1936.

00:02:26.680 Okay. So, and what did your parents do?

00:02:29.860 Well, my father was the secretary of the Bnei Brak municipality. But that only later,

00:02:37.260 only later, he came in and became a farmer. You come to Israel in 1924, you buy a piece of

00:02:43.220 land and you schlep water for miles away and you grow radishes. That's what he did.

00:02:49.400 Yeah. Yeah. That had to be hard work. It's probably still as hard work, but that was farming

00:02:56.580 was, had to be the first order of business.

00:02:58.140 First order. Yeah. The idea was to establish a biblical town with religious orientation and

00:03:05.660 make it into agricultural success.

00:03:10.360 Yes. Do you know about, much about your parents' state of mind when they left Europe in the 20s?

00:03:17.340 I mean, what was that?

00:03:18.180 Yes, I know.

00:03:18.640 Did they see, were they witnessing Weimar and it's...

00:03:22.820 No, no, no. My father didn't see.

00:03:25.160 No?

00:03:25.360 No. That was 1924. And, well, the legend says, at least the family law says that my grandfather

00:03:35.100 came home one day, he was accosted by a Polish peasant and called a dirty Jew, and he came 0.87

00:03:42.400 home bloody and he said to his wife and four children, start packing, we are going to where 0.99

00:03:48.280 we belong. Okay. Wow.

00:03:49.880 It's a family law, but it has some truth in it, yeah. And what were your principal intellectual

00:03:56.060 influences as a kid? I mean, how did you find your path to computer science as a young person?

00:04:03.860 First, I had a very, very good education in high school. It's a...

00:04:09.340 In Tel Aviv or...

00:04:10.840 I went to a high school in Tel Aviv, yes. I grew up in Bnei Brak, but the municipality of

00:04:17.020 Tel Aviv gave a quarter to its peripheral, to its suburbs. And Bnei Brak was one of its 0.57

00:04:23.800 suburbs. So from our town, they chose four people. I was chosen among them. It was a

00:04:29.680 privilege at the time to go to Tel Aviv high school. And we had a beautiful education.

00:04:35.780 You know why? Because my high school teachers were professors in Heidelberg and Berlin that

00:04:42.380 they were pushed out by Hitler. And when they came to Israel, they couldn't find an academic

00:04:47.380 job. So they taught high school. And we were just privileged and lucky to be part of this

00:04:53.480 unique educational experiment.

00:04:56.200 Yeah. Yeah. And your first language is Hebrew?

00:04:58.860 My first language is Hebrew. All the studies were in Hebrew.

00:05:02.160 So, but the people who had just come from Heidelberg, your professors were speaking Hebrew

00:05:08.040 at that point or what? Hebrew. Huh. Interesting. 0.87

00:05:10.540 They had to struggle. Some of them still had a Yekish accent.

00:05:15.740 Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So as I said, we spoke about your book of why last time, where

00:05:21.540 you talk about the importance of causal reasoning. What's your current view of AI? What has surprised

00:05:28.960 you in recent years? What is, how close to causal reasoning are we achieving in the current

00:05:35.860 crop of LLMs? And I'm just wondering what you, how you view progress at this point?

00:05:41.360 In causal reasoning or in toward the...

00:05:44.160 I guess toward AGI in general, but, you know.

00:05:48.280 If that is a goal, I don't think we are much closer. We have been deflected by the effect of LLMs.

00:05:56.100 You have low-flying fruits and everybody is excited, which is fine. I mean, they're doing

00:06:02.080 tremendously impressive job, but I don't think they take us toward the AGI.

00:06:09.320 So you think the framework, the LLM deep learning framework, is a dead end with respect to AGI?

00:06:15.660 No, it's a step.

00:06:17.040 But does it require a fundamental breakthrough of the sort that we haven't had?

00:06:21.080 Yes. Absolutely, yes.

00:06:22.380 So it's not just more data and more compute?

00:06:24.880 No, no, no, no. More data and scale-up, it's all, I don't think it's going to lead

00:06:32.260 over the hump that we need to cross.

00:06:34.900 Can you articulate the reason why, you know, in terms that a layperson can understand? I mean,

00:06:40.860 if someone asked you, why is this insurmountable by virtue of just throwing more data and compute

00:06:46.800 at it?

00:06:47.380 There are certain limitations, mathematical limitations, that are not crossable by scaling

00:06:54.140 up. I show it clearly mathematically in my book. And what LLMs do right now is they summarize

00:07:03.640 world models, authors by people like you and me, available on the web, and they do some sort

00:07:11.420 of mysterious summary of it, rather than discovering those world models directly from the data.

00:07:20.480 To give you an example, if you have data coming from hospitals about the effect of treatments,

00:07:27.680 you don't fit it directly into the LLMs today. The input is interpretation of that data, authored

00:07:36.840 by doctors, physicians, and people who already have world model, the body disease, and what it does.

00:07:43.520 But couldn't we just put the data itself in as well?

00:07:46.520 Here you have a limitation. Here's a limitation defined by the ladder of causation. There is

00:07:52.860 something that you cannot do if you don't have a certain input. For instance, you cannot get

00:07:58.680 causation from correlation. That is well-established, okay? No one would deny even

00:08:05.040 satisfaction by that, okay? And you cannot get interpretation from intervention. Interpretation

00:08:12.220 means looking backward and doing introspection.

00:08:14.720 You say you can't get interpretation from interventions?

00:08:17.720 You cannot.

00:08:18.720 But intervention is, just to remind me, but it's...

00:08:21.980 Intervention is what will happen if I do.

00:08:23.900 Right. So it's a kind of an experiment or a thought experiment.

00:08:26.940 Experiment. Experiment, correct.

00:08:28.480 And also, doesn't it imply a kind of counterfactual condition where you're saying, you know, what

00:08:33.040 would have happened if we didn't intervene?

00:08:34.880 No. No?

00:08:35.920 Here you have a barrier.

00:08:36.880 Ah.

00:08:37.520 You have to have additional information to cross from the intervention level to the interpretation

00:08:43.200 level.

00:08:43.600 And you'd put counterfactuals on the side of interpretation.

00:08:46.560 Yes, correct. Because you go, you say, look what I've seen that David killed Goliath, and

00:08:51.840 what would have happened had the wind been differently, okay?

00:08:55.520 So who among the other patriarchs in the field fundamentally disagrees with you? I mean,

00:09:01.600 do people like Jeffrey Hinton or others who have had...

00:09:04.480 I don't think they disagree. They don't address it.

00:09:07.840 I haven't... Well, Jeff Hinton came up with the statement that we are facing a deadlock, okay?

00:09:14.400 Oh, I hadn't heard that, yeah.

00:09:15.600 Yes, yes. He mentioned there that this is not the way to get AGI, but he didn't elaborate on

00:09:23.040 the causal component.

00:09:24.720 Mm-hmm.

00:09:25.600 So I can't recall if we spoke about this last time, but where are you on concerns around

00:09:31.600 alignment and an intelligence explosion? I mean, I know it sounds like you're not worried that

00:09:36.400 LLMs will produce such a thing, but in principle, are you worried, do you take IJ Goods and others'

00:09:43.280 early fears seriously that once we build AGI on whatever, on the basis of whatever platform,

00:09:49.520 we're in the presence of something that can become recursively self-improving and get away from us?

00:09:54.400 Absolutely, yes. I don't see any computational impediments to that horrifying dream. And

00:10:03.200 of course, we're already seeing dangers of LLMs when they fall into the hands of bad actors. But that's

00:10:13.760 not what we're worried about. We're worried about a truly AGI system that will take over and may be a

00:10:20.560 danger to humanity, yes. Definitely foresee that possible. I can see how it can acquire free will

00:10:27.360 and consciousness and the desire to play around with people. That is quite feasible. It doesn't mean

00:10:34.560 that I'm not going to, I'm going to stop working or understanding AI and its capability simply because

00:10:42.800 I want to understand myself. Yeah, yeah. Are you worried that the field is operating under a kind

00:10:50.480 of a system of incentives, essentially an arms race that is going to select for reckless behavior? I mean,

00:10:57.040 just that we, if there is this potential failure mode of building something that destroys us,

00:11:02.400 it seems at least from the, um, the statements of the people who are doing this work, you know,

00:11:07.360 the people who are running the major companies, you know, that the probability of such a encountering

00:11:12.000 such existential risk is in their minds at least pretty high. I mean, we're not hearing people

00:11:16.640 like Sam Altman say, oh yeah, I think the chances are, you know, one in a million that we're going to

00:11:21.840 destroy the future with this technology. They're putting the chances at like 20% and yet they're still

00:11:27.200 going as fast as possible. Doesn't an arms race seem like the worst condition to do this

00:11:32.480 carefully? There are many other people that are worried about it, like Stuart Russell and other,

00:11:38.560 and the problem is that we don't know how to control it. And whoever says 20% or 5% is just

00:11:45.520 talking. We cannot put a number of that because we don't have a theoretical or technical

00:11:52.480 instruments to predict whether or not we can control it. We do not know what's going to happen,

00:11:58.560 what's going to develop.

00:11:59.840 Right. But what I find alarming about those utterances is that, I mean, if you just imagine

00:12:03.840 if the, you know, the physicists who gave us the bomb, you know, the, you know, the Manhattan Project,

00:12:10.240 if one asked about their initial concern that it might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all of

00:12:16.320 life on planet Earth, if they had been the ones saying, yeah, maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 15%,

00:12:22.720 and yet they were still moving forward with the work, that would have been alarming. But of course,

00:12:26.240 that's not what they were saying. They were, they did some calculation and they put the chances

00:12:30.240 to be, you know, infinitesimal, though not zero. It just seems bizarre culturally that we have the

00:12:36.480 people doing the work who are not expressing, you know, fallaciously or not. I'll grant you that

00:12:42.160 all of this is made up and it's hard to come up with a, with a rational estimate, but for the people

00:12:46.800 doing the work, plowing, you know, trillions of dollars into the build-out of AI to be giving

00:12:52.400 numbers like 20% seems culturally strange.

00:12:56.080 I don't know what I mean by 20%. Look at me, I am fairly sure. All I'm saying is there's no

00:13:05.680 theoretical impediment for creating such a species, dominating species.

00:13:10.240 That is true. And at the same time, I'm working toward that indirectly, not toward that in order

00:13:18.000 to create it, but to understand the capabilities of intelligence in general, because I want to

00:13:25.920 understand ourselves because I'm curious.

00:13:28.960 Do you have any thoughts about how a system would have to be built so as to be perpetually aligned

00:13:37.040 with our interests? I mean, so if you're taking intelligence seriously, right? So we're talking

00:13:42.400 about building an autonomous intelligent system that exceeds our own intelligence and in the limit,

00:13:48.320 improves itself, one would imagine. Do you have any notions about what a guarantee of an

00:13:54.240 alignment could look like before we hit play on that?

00:13:57.280 No, I don't think we can imagine an effective alignment or an effective architecture that will

00:14:06.160 reassure us of alignment with our survival.

00:14:09.680 I think Stuart Russell, it's been a couple of years since I've spoken with him, but I recall

00:14:14.720 his notion. Again, this is, I'm sure this is a kind of a hand-waving notion from the computer

00:14:19.600 science point of view, but to have as its utility function, just to better and better approximate

00:14:26.080 what we want, to be perpetually uncertain that it's achieved our goals insofar as we can continue to

00:14:33.360 articulate them in this open-ended conversation that is the evolution of human culture. Does that

00:14:38.880 seem like a frame that...?

00:14:40.400 It's a nice frame, but I don't see any impediment for the new species to overcome and bypass those

00:14:48.480 guidelines and play.

00:14:51.760 What, what, so people, so people have an intuition that if we built it, there's no possibility of it

00:14:59.440 forming its own goals like that we didn't anticipate, the instrumental goals. I mean,

00:15:04.560 this is like, I mean, there are people fairly close to the field who will say this. I'm not sure. I mean,

00:15:09.760 maybe even someone like Jan Lacoon would say this, but what would you say to that? I mean,

00:15:13.920 you just very breezily articulated certainty that, or something like certainty that an independently

00:15:20.720 intelligent system can play, that it can change its mind, it can discover new goals and cognitive

00:15:27.760 horizons, just as we seem to be able to do. Why is there a difference of intuition on this front?

00:15:33.360 I mean, like, your account seems obvious to me.

00:15:36.240 I don't know why I have different intuition than Lacoon.

00:15:41.680 I just, look, once you want a system that will explore, explore its environment, that's

00:15:52.080 required for any intelligent system. We want it to play like a baby in a crib and find out

00:15:58.400 why this toy makes noise and this doesn't, okay? So it has to play around in order to

00:16:03.120 get control over the environment, to understand the environment, okay? So once you have the idea

00:16:07.920 of playing, what will prevent from playing with us as instrument for his or her understanding,

00:16:15.440 yeah? For instrument for environment to become part of its environment.

00:16:21.200 All right. So this is kind of a reckless pivot from the topic of AI, but it's, I think there's a bridge

00:16:27.040 here. I mean, I guess we could put this sort of in the frame of the cultural conditions that

00:16:32.320 that allow us to reason effectively or fail to reason effectively. And this is on, you know,

00:16:37.760 morally loaded topics like, you know, war and, you know, asymmetric violence, anti-Semitism,

00:16:44.560 Islamism, again, Israel status among nations. You know, unfortunately you are unusually well-placed 1.00

00:16:50.320 to have an opinion on these topics, given your history and what happened to your son back in 2002.

00:16:56.720 I don't want to, you know, awaken painful memories, but I just feel like I would need to,

00:17:02.320 I'm happy to talk about this topic in any way you want, but I just need to acknowledge that your son,

00:17:07.600 Danny, was one of the most prominent people killed by Al-Qaeda when the war on terror, so-called,

00:17:14.320 became of, you know, salient to most people in America, certainly for the first time after 9-11.

00:17:21.280 So you've spent, you know, now a quarter of a century witnessing, you know, as I have, but from

00:17:26.720 a far kind of deeper space, the kind of consistent misunderstanding around jihadism and Islamism that

00:17:36.720 has happened, especially on the left in our society. To my eye, we have a kind of an anti-colonial

00:17:44.160 oppressor-oppressed narrative that has captured the moral intuitions of the left such that it's very

00:17:49.440 difficult to talk about some of the ideas within Islam that reliably beget the kind of violence

00:17:54.800 we've seen. And, and, you know, the groups like the Muslim Brotherhood has managed to play havoc 1.00

00:17:59.840 with this moral confusion. They've found legions of useful idiots, even on college campuses like 1.00

00:18:05.440 your own. I mean, I don't know if you noticed this, but the other day, the UAE announced that 1.00

00:18:09.920 it would no longer pay for its students to study in the UK at UK universities for fear that they will

00:18:16.480 be radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood on UK campuses. So, I mean, that's how far the rot has 0.98

00:18:20.880 spread. We can take this from any side. We can, we can talk about 20 plus years ago where, how you

00:18:26.080 came to this or your experience after your, I want to talk about your experience after October 7th.

00:18:31.760 Just, you know, please start wherever you want to start, but.

00:18:33.920 But the, my son's tragedy, tragedy pushed me into public life and into my interest with the social

00:18:45.680 problem and cultural problem, the way you are describing. Yeah. I, we started the foundation

00:18:52.320 after his death to, with the same belief that it's a matter of communication, dialogue with,

00:18:59.440 between the East and West, Jews and Muslims. And we, I got pushed into that very heavily.

00:19:08.240 And I started with, together with the Pakistani scholar, we started the Daniel Pearl dialogue

00:19:16.640 between Muslims and Jews. And we went from town to town and we had the meetings and the discussions,

00:19:24.080 audience discussions. I even took a trip, which I describe in the book, a trip to Doha in 2005 as

00:19:32.720 part of the conference to bridge East-West relationship and to understand what prevents

00:19:40.640 the Muslim world or the Arab world, the Muslim world, yeah, from modernizing and become enlightened as we

00:19:48.880 are. And I was very, very, that was the first time that I found the barriers, which I didn't believe

00:19:56.640 exist. And this was the barrier of Israel. Like we came there with the idea that they would like to, 0.84

00:20:04.480 American help in getting modernized and progressive. And we came out, my conclusion is that they had a

00:20:15.280 different idea in mind. And we are talking about moderate Muslim scholars from all over the Muslim

00:20:23.760 world gathering in Doha for this conference, the purpose of which was what can Americans do to speed up

00:20:32.480 the process of progress and democratization of the Muslim world. And I can, their idea was,

00:20:42.640 if you want us to modernize, we'll give you that favor. We are going to do you the favor of modernizing

00:20:50.560 ourselves on one condition. We want Israel head on a tray, on a silver platter. This is a condition. 1.00

00:21:00.240 We cannot make any progress unless you chop off the head of Israel. 1.00

00:21:04.960 Yeah. Well, and you were at this time, you were living in Los Angeles, right? You were not living 0.98

00:21:10.320 in Israel in 2005. No, no, I was in Los Angeles, of course. When did you come, when did you come to

00:21:15.680 L.A.? I came to L.A. 1966. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to

00:21:23.600 subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making

00:21:29.520 Sense Podcast. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 16, 2026

#453 — AI and the New Face of Antisemitism

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