“Imagine a chimpanzee being like, okay, so there's going to be a new version of me that's like a bit smarter. What is the risk? Well, is it going to like eat more of the bananas? Like, well, what are they really going to do? Chimps could not conceptualize the atomic bomb and like roads. And this is the same thing. We cannot conceptualize the actual risks of smarter than human intelligence… because it is just beyond our comprehension.”
StarTalk Radio · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Context
The conversation is about whether a far more intelligent AI would compete with humans for resources, and Chuck Nice has joked that chimpanzees would be our enemies if they knew we liked bananas. Aza takes the analogy further: a chimp could not imagine what a smarter version of itself would build, and humans are in the same position with smarter-than-human AI.
Transcript
…question you need to ask is earthworm or chimp is: are those other more intelligent beings, is AI, is it competing for the same resources as we are? And if the answer is yes, you know, it's going to go very poorly for us. If the answer is no, then we just get stepped over and not stepped off. Yeah,
if chimpanzees knew that we liked bananas, we would probably be their enemies. Yeah,
…so there's going to be a new version of me that's like a bit smarter. What is the risk? Well, is it going to like, are they going to like eat more of the bananas? Like, well, what are they really going to do? Like, chimps could not conceptualize the atomic bomb and like roads. And this is the same thing. We cannot conceptualize the actual risks of smarter than human intelligence in these swarms because it is just beyond our comprehension. But I do want to go back just for one second to something I find really beautiful here. Because the fundamental question is: okay, so you cast the light of the human mind through the world and the shadow is language. And we're going to do the same thing with every communication system for whales and for parrots and for elephants. And the question is, how much do those shadows overlap? And the…
mathematically, we would describe these as other dimensions of information. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. There's the shape and then there's some other aspect of that shape once you have the shape. And so, okay, proceed. No, it's exactly right.
And so you then take the shape for English and you take the shape for images. And it's not quite a rotation anymore, but there's a pretty clean mapping that just puts these two things together. And now you can translate from language into images. But it's not just that. It's also code has a shape.…
just to be clear, you could not have done that if you didn't otherwise know what they were looking at. You would just have this fMRI signal. The connectivity is because you gave them something to look at. That's right. So you've established the correlation
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