Bill Maher Admits One Thing Scares Him More Than Trump

Real Time host Bill Maher has shared that one thing scares him more than anything else in the world, including President Donald Trump, and that’s the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

Maher made the claim on the latest episode of his Club Random podcast, where he spoke with Friends alum Lisa Kudrow. The third season of Kudrow’s HBO sitcom The Comeback revolves around this topic, as her character, Valerie Cherish, joins a new sitcom written with generative AI.

“I consider this so far and above the most important issue than anything else,” Maher said, per TheWrap. “Yes, there’s Trump and nukes and that. But it’s actually AI.… I’m more scared of it than anything and think it’s more dire than anything.”

The comedian praised Kudrow and The Comeback for tackling the issue, saying it’s “the perfect Act III subject for this moment… you’re so right on the money with that.”

“Of course, given the rate that AI is moving, it’s probably two weeks ahead of reality,” he added before explaining how he recently considered dedicating a whole segment of his show to the topic. In the end, he decided not to do that, but reiterated that he believes it’s the most scary issue of the modern world.

“Maybe,” Kudrow responded before sharing her own thoughts on the topic. “It’s not just AI… it’s that human beings have created it and don’t really know what it is and don’t know enough to put the guardrails in. That’s what you’re saying?”

Kudrow said that AI can be useful as a “tool,” so long as humans supervise it.

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Maher admitted that, “It will probably, in some years, a few years from now, cure me of some terrible disease I otherwise would’ve died from,” before adding, “Then the next year the robots will completely take over and nuke the world because, in their computation, we are the problem.’

“There’s a reason why [Geoffrey] Hinton, the Godfather of AI, said there was a 10-20% chance of an extinction,” he continued. “And [Elon] Musk has said, ‘This s*** scares me to hell.'”

“I know, but what are you going to do?” Kudrow quipped.

“Right, because the genie’s out of the bottle,” Maher concluded.