My column: Stephen Colbert is ready for AI to make all the decisions instead of humans A clip from a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is going viral. The clip comes from an interview with historian Yuval Noah Harari. Here’s my transcription: Colbert: I’m not that worried about AI. It just doesn’t get my blood going to get worried about AI. I think of some positive aspects of it. I mean, I’ve seen how humans have handled history and… not great. And so I’m ready for the big machines that make big decisions programmed by fellas with compassion and vision. You know, I’m ready for the machines to tell us what to do. Are you? Harari: Uh, Not really. It’s extremely dangerous to give up power to something we don’t understand. Colbert: Why is it so dangerous though? They’re just extensions of us. Harari: No they’re not. Colbert: Yes they are. We made them, they’re us. First of all, we have to acknowledge that we don’t actually know how much Colbert’s comments match his actual opinion. If you just read the text, it might not read as if he’s trying to be funny, but he definitely was, at least during parts of that exchange. He may also have been merely attempting to spark interesting discussion with his guest. But given Colbert’s wholehearted embrace of Anthony Fauci, lockdowns, and vaccines, it’s not hard to imagine that he really does embrace a technocratic future ruled by AI programmed by “the right people.” This topic is actually an interesting call back to my very first column at Being Right called, “Stop being afraid of new technology.” In it, I address a phenomenon that often crops up on the right where new technologies are only viewed in terms of their worst potential uses. So in that light, I agree with Colbert that AI has many positive aspects. For example, all of the artwork that accompanies my columns here is created by Microsoft Copilot based on text prompts I give it. That’s really helpful! And while all of these posts are actually written by me, many people use AI to create creative written works that might be outside of their skills as writers. But in my piece on how to assess new technologies I said the following: “The wrong response is to fear any new technology. The right response is to recognize both the positive and negative purposes that technology can be put to.” Colbert, if we’re to take his words seriously, is seeing only the positive uses of AI. It’s hard to get a real sense of Harari’s views on the subject since Colbert mostly talks over him, but he seems at least concerned that AI is, or will become, something outside of our ability to control. In fact, Colbert’s reason for not worrying about AI is the very thing that concerns me most. I’m not actually all that concerned about AI becoming self-aware like Skynet in the Terminator films. AI is just software, and as such is susceptible to the same “garbage in, garbage out” problem that can plague any software product. Google’s Gemini AI tool wasn’t generating images of non-white Founding Fathers because that represented its own framework for thinking about race and oppression dynamics. It was doing it because its programmers were woke leftwing humans who themselves are obsessed with racializing all of human society. Colbert simultaneously says in that clip that he wants AI to take over because humans have messed things up, but he also dismisses concerns of AI being dangerous because “We made them. They’re us.” The reality is “we” (flawed, biased human beings) made AI, so that AI is going to reflect the perspectives and priorities of its programmers. Like any tool, AI can be used for great good and for great evil. It’s neither inherently bad nor inherently good. It’s what its programmers and its users choose to do with it.