Making Sense with Sam Harris - #453 — AI and the New Face of Antisemitism

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about causality, AI, and antisemitism. They discuss why LLMs won't spawn AGI, alignment concerns in the race for AGI, Pearl's public life after the murder of his son Daniel, the post-October 7th shift toward open anti-Zionism, the overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the misuse of "Islamophobia," Israel's fracture under Netanyahu, confronting anti-Zionism in universities, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast,

and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, I'm here with Judea Pearl. Judea, thanks for coming into the studio. Great to see you. It's the second time, isn't it?

Yeah, I came to you last time. Yeah, I was in your office. I actually didn't look to see when that was, but that's a few years ago, certainly. That might be. That was for your book, the Book of Y. The Book of Why. Which kind of wraps up for a popular audience,

all of your work on causality and logic of that, which will touch briefly, because I have to ask you about AI, given that you were one of the fathers of the field, but that's not really our agenda today, but we'll start near there. But I want to talk to you about your new book. You have a new book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words, which I'm sorry to say I have not yet read,

but that will give you the ability to say anything to a naive audience on this topic. I'm sure it covers much of the ground I want to cover with you because I'm like you, I think, very concerned about cultural issues and the way that we've seen a rise of anti-Semitism on both the left and the right, and we're now seeing the condition of Israel as a near pariah state on the world stage. Briefly, let's start with your background.

Where were you born, and what did your parents do? Well, I was born in a little town called Bnabrak, which is seven and a half miles north of Tel Aviv. And it was established in 1924 by my grandfather, Chaim Perl, with 25 other Hasidic families who came from Poland and decided that it's time to go back to where they belong. So when did they move to Israel, your parents? In 1924.

My father. My father family came in 1924. And when were you born? In 1936. Okay. So, and what did your parents do? Well, my father was the secretary of the Nebrach municipality. But that's only later, learning later.

He came in and became a farmer. You come to Israel in 1924, you buy a piece of land, and you schlep water from miles away, and you grow radishes. That's what he did. Yeah. Yeah, that had to be hard work. It's probably still as hard work, but farming had to be the first order of business. The first order, yes.

The idea was to establish a biblical town with religious orientation. and make it into agricultural success. Do you know much about your parents' state of mind when they left Europe in the 20s? I mean, what was that? Yes, I know. Did they see, were they witnessing Weimar and it's... No, no, no.

My father didn't see. No? It was 1924. And, well, the legend says, at least the family law says that my grandfather came home one day. He was accosted by a Polish peasant and called a dirty Jew. And he came home bloody, and he said to his wife and four children start packing,

we are going to where we belong. That's a family law, but it has some truth in it. And what were your principal intellectual influences as a kid? I mean, how did you find your path to computer science as a young person? First, I had a very, very good education in high school. It's a... In Tel Aviv or... I went to a high school in Tel Aviv.

Yes. I grew up in B'nai Bruck, but the municipality of Tel Aviv gave a quota to its peripheral to its suburbs. And B'nai B'Avraq was one of its suburbs. So from our town, they chose four people. I was chosen among them. It was a privilege at the time to go to a Tel Aviv high school. and we had a beautiful education.

You know why? Because my high school teachers were professors in Heidelberg and Berlin. Yeah, yeah. That were pushed out by Hitler. And when they came to Israel, they couldn't find academic jobs. So they taught high school.

And we were just privileged and lucky to be part of this unique educational experiment. Yeah, yeah. And your first language is Hebrew? My first language is Hebrew. All the studies were in Hebrew. So, but the people who had just come from Heidelberg, they were, your professors were speaking Hebrew at that point? Hebrew.

Huh. Interesting. They had to struggle. Some of them still had a yakish accent. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. So as I said, we spoke about your book of why last time where you talk about the importance of causal reasoning. What's your current view of AI? What has surprised you in recent years? What is how close to causal? Are we achieving in the current crop of LLMs? And I'm just wondering how you view progress at this point. In causal reasoning or in toward the... I guess toward AGI in general.

If that is a goal that I don't think we are much closer, we have been deflected by the effect of LLMs. You have a low-flying fruits and everybody is excited, which is fine. I mean, they're doing tremendously impressive job. But I don't think they take us toward the AGI. So you think the framework, the LLM Deep Learning Framework, is a dead end with respect to AGI?

No, it's a step. But it does it require a fundamental breakthrough of those sorts that we haven't had? Absolutely, yes. So it's not just more data and more compute. No, no, no, no, no, no. More data and scale up. It's all, I don't think it's going to lead over the hump that we need to cross.

Can you articulate the reason why, you know, in terms that a lay person can understand? I mean, if someone asked you, why is this insurmountable by virtue of just throwing more data and compute at it? There are certain limitations, mathematical limitations, that are not crossable by scaling up. I show it clearly mathematically in my book. And what LLM's doing right now is they summarize world models, authors by people like you and me, available on the web, and they do some sort of mysterious summary of it, rather than discovering those world models directly from the data.

To give you as an example, okay, if you have data coming from hospitals about the effect of treatments, okay, You don't fit it directly into the LLMs today. You get the input is interpretation of that data, authors by doctors, physicians, and people who already have world model body disease and what it does. But couldn't we just put the data itself in as well?

Here you have a limitation. You have the limitation defined by the ladder of causation. There is something that you cannot do if you don't have a certain input. For instance, you cannot get causation from correlation. That is well established, okay? No one would deny even satisfaction by that. And you cannot get interpretation from intervention.

Interpretation means looking backward, doing introspection. You say you can't get interpretation from interventions? But intervention is just to remind me, but it's... Intervention is what will happen if I do. Right. So it's kind of an experiment or a thought of. Experiments. Correct.

And also, doesn't it imply a kind of counterfactual condition where you're saying, you know, what would have happened if we didn't intervene? No. No? Here you have a barrier. You have to have additional information to cross from the intervention level to the interpretation level. And you put counterfactuals on the side of interpretation. Yes, correct.

Because you go, you say, look what I've seen, that David killed Goliath, and what would have happened had the wind been differently, okay? So who among the other patriarchs in the field fundamentally disagrees with you? I mean, do people like Jeffrey Hinton or others who have had... I don't think they disagree. They don't address it. I haven't... Well, Jeff Hinton came up with a statement that we are facing deadlock.

Oh, I hadn't heard that, yeah. Yes, yes. He mentioned that this is not the way to get AGI, but he didn't elaborate on the causal component. So I can't recall if we spoke about this last time, but where are you on concerns around alignment and an intelligence explosion? I mean, I know it sounds like you're not worried that LLMs will produce such a thing, but in principle, are you worried? Do you take IJ. Goods and others early fears seriously that once we build AGI on whatever, on the base of whatever platform, we're in the presence of something that can become recursively self-improving and get away from us? Absolutely, yes. I don't see any computational impediments to that horrifying dream. And, of course, but we already see dangers of LLM when they fall into the hands of bad actors.

But that's not what you're worried about. You're worried about a truly AGI system that will take over and maybe a danger to humanity. Yes. Definitely foresee that possible. I can see how it can acquire free will and consciousness and desire to play around with people. That is quite feasible. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to stop working or understanding AI and its capability simply because I want to understand myself. Yeah, yeah.

Are you worried that the field is operating under kind of a system of incentives, essentially an arms race that is going to select for reckless behavior. I mean, just that we, if there is this potential failure mode of building something that destroys us, it seems, at least from the statements of the people who are doing this work, you know, the people who are running the major companies, you know, that the probability of such a encountering such existential risk is in their minds, pretty high. I mean, we're not hearing people like Sam Altman say, oh, yeah, I think the chances are, you know,

one in a million that we're going to destroy the future with this technology. They're putting in the chances at like 20%, and yet they're still going as fast as possible. Doesn't an arms race seem like the worst condition to do this carefully? There are many other people that are worried about it, like Stuart Russell's and other. And the problem is that we don't know how to control it. And whoever says 20% or 5% is just talking. Yes, and, yeah. We cannot put a number of that because we don't have it.

theoretical, I mean, technical instruments to predict whether or not we can control it. We do not know what's going to develop. But what I find alarming about those utterances is that, me, if you just imagine if the, you know, the physicists who gave us the bomb, you know, the Manhattan Project, if one asked about their initial concern that it might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all of life on planet Earth, if they had been the one saying, yeah, maybe it's 20%, maybe it's 15%, and yet they were still moving forward with the work, that would have been alarming. But of course, that's not what they were saying. They did some calculation and they put the chances to be infinitesimal, though not zero.

It just seems bizarre, culturally, that we have the people doing the work who are not expressing, you know, fallaciously or not, I'll grant you that all of this is made up and it's hard to come up with a with a rational estimate, but for the people doing the work, plowing, you know, trillions of dollars into the buildout of AI to be giving numbers like 20% seems culturally strange. And I don't know what I mean, but 20%. Look at me, I am fairly sure. All I'm saying is there's no theoretical impediment

for creating such a species, dominating species. Right. Okay. That is true. And at the same time, I'm working, toward that indirectly, not toward that in order to create it, but to understand the capabilities of intelligence in general, because I want to understand ourselves, because I'm curious. Do you have any thoughts about how a system would have to be built so as to be perpetually aligned

with our interests? I mean, so if you're taking intelligence seriously, right? So we're talking about building an autonomous intelligence system that exceeds our own intelligence and in the limit improves itself, one would imagine. Do you have any notions about what a guarantee of an alignment

could look like before we hit play on that? No. I don't think we can imagine an effective alignment or an effective architecture that will be assures of alignment with our survival. I think Stuart Russell

has been a couple of years since I've spoken with him, but I recall his notion, again, this is, I'm sure this is kind of a hand-waving notion from the computer science point of view, but to have as its utility function just to better and better approximate what we want, to be perpetually uncertain that it's achieved our goals in so far as we can continue to articulate them in this open-ended conversation that is the evolution of human culture. Does that seem like a frame that? It's a nice frame, but I don't see it. an impediment for the new species to overcome and bypass those guidelines and play.

So people have an intuition that if we built it, there's no possibility of it forming its own goals, like that we didn't anticipate, the instrumental goals. I mean, there are people fairly close to the field who will say this. I'm not sure. I mean, maybe even someone like Jan Lacoon would say this. But what would you say to that? I mean, you just very breezily articulated certainty that, or something like certainty, that an independently intelligent system can play, that it can change its mind,

it can discover new goals and cognitive horizons, just as we seem to be able to do. Why is there a difference of intuition on this front? I mean, your account seems obvious to me. I don't know why I have different intuitions than Le Cron. I just look, once you want a system that will explore, explore its environment, that's required for any intelligent system. We wanted to play like a baby in the cream and find out why this toy makes noise and this doesn't. Okay, so it has to play around in order to get control over the environment,

to understand the environment, okay? So once you have the idea of playing, what will prevent from playing? with us as instrument for his or her understanding, yeah, for instruments for environment. It become part of its environment. All right, so this is kind of a reckless pivot from the topic of AI, but it's, I think there's a bridge here. I mean, I guess we could put this sort of in the frame

of the cultural conditions that allow us to reason effectively or fail to reason effectively. And this is on morally loaded topics like, you know, war and, you know, asymmetric violence, anti-Semitism, Islamism, again, Israel's status among nations. You know, unfortunately, you are unusually well placed to have an opinion on these topics given your history and what happened to your son back in 2002. I don't want to, you know, awaken painful memories, but I just feel like I would need to, I'm happy to talk about this topic in any way you want, but I just need to acknowledge that your son, Danny was one of the most

prominent people killed by al-Qaeda when the war on terror so-called became of, you know, salient to most people in America, certainly for the first time after 9-11. So you've spent, you know, now a quarter of a century witnessing, you know, as I have, but from a far, kind of deeper space, the kind of consistent misunderstanding around jihadism and Islamism that has happened, especially on the left in our society. I mean, to my eye, we have a kind of an anti-colonial oppressor-oppressed narrative that has captured the moral intuitions of the left such that it's very difficult to talk about some of the ideas within Islam that reliably beget the kind of violence we've seen. And, you know, the groups like the Muslim Brotherhood has managed to play havoc with this moral confusion. They found legions of useful idiots, even on college campuses like your own.

I don't know if you notice this, but the other day, the UAE, announced that it would no longer pay for its students to study in the UK at the UK universities for fear that they will be radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood on UK campuses. So, I mean, that's how far the rot has spread. We can take this from any side. We can talk about 20 plus years ago where how you came to this or your experience after, I want to talk about your experience after October 7th. Just, you know, please start wherever you want to start. But the, my son's strategy, actually pushed me into

public life and into my interest with the social problem and cultural problem the way you're describing. I started the foundation after his death with the same belief

that it's a matter of communication, dialogue with between the East and West Jews and Muslims and we, I got pushed into that very heavily. And I started together with the Pakistani scholar. We started the Daniel Peirle dialogue between Muslims and Jews.

And we went from town to town. And we had the meetings and the discussions, audience discussions. I even took a trip, which I describe in the book, a trip to Doha in 2005 as part of the conference to bridge East-West relationship and to understand what prevents the Muslim world or the Arab world, a Muslim world, yeah, from modernizing and become enlightened as we are.

And I was very, very, that was the first time that I found the barriers which I didn't believe exist. And this was the barrier of Israel. We came there with the idea that they would like to, American help in getting modernized, okay? And progressive.

And we came out, my conclusion is that they had a different idea in mind. And we are talking here about moderate Muslim scholars from all over the Muslim world, gathering in Doha for this conference, the purpose of which was what an American do to speed up the process of progress in democratization of the Muslim world. And their idea was, if you want us to modernize, we'll give you that favor.

We are going to do you the favor of modernizing ourselves on one condition. We want Israel head on a tray, on a silver plateau. This is a condition. We cannot make any progress unless you charge. of the head of Israel. Well, and you were, at this time, you were living in Los Angeles, right?

You were not living in Israel in 2005. No, no, I was in Los Angeles, of course. When did you come to L.A.? I came to, in 1966. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast.

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