Renowned computer scientist on anthropomorphizing technology

Whenever we're presented with some form of intelligent entity, we tend to anthropomorphize it. This can be a very, very positive thing when used correctly. It's not true from the sort of rationalist or the new rationalist reductionist sense that a tree has a spirit, but if you think of a tree having a spirit, you might coexist better with your forests. People are looking at the capabilities of AI, which are very different from ours, a very different form of intelligence, and sort of saying, well, if I had those capabilities, I'd do this, therefore existential risk. It's like that's saying more about the person who's saying that than that saying about the technology. And I think the challenge is that when you look at something like animism, that presumably emerged. Well, it did emerge over years of cultural evolution within those groups, and the groups that had those concepts presumably survived better than those that didn't. And we're dealing with these technologies without that time frame to assimilate them within our culture.