Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman says the panic around AI today is almost identical to the panic around the printing press when it was invented. People feared it would degrade human memory and destroy society. In retrospect it was obviously transformative and made modern science possible. But it also triggered nearly a century of religious war. His takeaway is not that AI is safe, it is that humans are historically bad at navigating these transitions and need to steer intelligently rather than just regulate out of fear.
Village Global Chairman Reid Hoffman says the panic around AI today is almost identical to the panic around the printing press when it was invented. People feared it would degrade human memory and destroy society. In retrospect it was obviously transformative and made modern science possible. But it also triggered nearly a century of religious war. His takeaway is not that AI is safe, it is that humans are historically bad at navigating these transitions and need to steer intelligently rather than just regulate out of fear.
