Yerevan /Mediamax/. George Soros, Founder and Chair of the Open Society Foundations, believes that "AI is developing incredibly fast, and it is impossible for ordinary human intelligence to fully understand it.”

In the article for Project Syndicate, George Soros writes:

“I grew up before AI was invented. That made me a great believer in reality. I realized at a relatively early age how difficult it is to understand the world I was born into, and I looked to reality to provide me with moral guidance.

We, human beings, are both participants and observers in the world in which we live. As participants we want to change the world in our favor; as observers we want to understand reality as it is. These two objectives interfere with each other. I regard this as an important insight which allows me to distinguish between right and wrong.

AI destroyed this simple schema because it has absolutely nothing to do with reality. AI creates its own reality and when that artificial reality fails to correspond to the real world – which happens quite often – it is discarded as hallucination.

This made me almost instinctively opposed to AI and I wholeheartedly agree with the experts who argue that it needs to be regulated. But the regulations have to be globally enforceable because the incentive to cheat is too great; those who evade the regulations gain an unfair advantage.

Unfortunately, global regulations are unattainable because the world is dominated by a conflict between two systems of governance which are diametrically opposed to each other. They have radically different views on what needs to be regulated and why.

I refer to the two systems of governance as open and closed societies. I define the difference between the two as follows: in an open society, the role of the state is to defend the freedom of the individual; in a closed society, the role of the individual is to serve the interests of the rulers.

AI is developing incredibly fast, and it is impossible for ordinary human intelligence to fully understand it. Nobody can predict where it will take us. But we can be sure of one thing: AI helps closed societies and poses a mortal threat to open societies. That’s because AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help closed societies to surveil their subjects.

This is why I am instinctively opposed to AI, but I don’t know how it can be stopped. Right now, nobody else does either, but most of those who developed AI recognize the need to regulate it. So does Congress and President Joe Biden’s administration.”