During a lengthy segment on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Anderson Cooper conducted an interview with Israeli historian and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari in which he admitted to being frightened by his predictions about the future of humanity.
At the start of the interview, Cooper quoted Harari's claim that humans alive today will be "one of the last generations of homosapiens" and that "within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from chimpanzees."
"Yes," Harari replied.
"What the hell does that mean?" asked Cooper. "That freaked me out!"
"You know, we'll soon have the power to reengineer our bodies and brains, whether it is with genetic engineering or by directly connecting brains to computers, or by creating completely non-organic entities," he explained.
"If true, that creates a whole other species," Cooper observed.
"This is something that is way beyond just another species," Harari said.
The historian went on to explain that the real danger lies in creating artificial intelligence that solves problems much more efficiently than humans do, but that also lacks any sense of morality and responsibility in how it solves those problems.
Harari also warned of the possibility that only the super-wealthy would have access to this kind of technology and that it would lead to even more spiraling inequality than what we see today.
"For the first time it will be real biological inequality," he said. "If the new technologies are available only to the rich, or only to people from a certain country, then homo sapiens will split into different biological castes."
Watch the interview below.
Anderson Cooper spooked by historian's claim that we're 'the last generation' of humanswww.youtube.com
