The text of a talk Stephen Fry gave on Thursday 12th September as the inaugural "Living Well With Technology" lecture for King's College London's Digital Futures Institute.
He talks about AI - or, as he says, Ai.
As a well known media personality/celebrity, who has a track-record of making outstandingly wrong predictions:
https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/ai-a-means-to-an-end-or-a-means-to
I would be asked to address delegates and attendees on the subject of a new microblogging service that had only recently poked its timorous head up in the digital world like a delicate flower but was already twisting and winding itself round the culture like vigorous bindweed. Twitter it was called. I had joined early and my name seemed permanently associated with it. What an evangel I was. Web 2.0, the user-generated web, was going great guns at this point. Tick off the years. 2003 MySpace began. 2004 Facebook launched. 2005 YouTube. 2006 Twitter. 2007 the iPhone. 2008 the App Store and later that year, Android and then Instagram. Bliss was it in that dawn, etc. etc. I confidently predicted that this new kind of citizen-led computer and internet use would help build a brave and beautiful new world. "Local and global rivalries will dissolve," I said. "Tribal hatreds will melt away. Surely," I cried, "Twitter and Facebook and this new world of 'social media' will usher in an age of universal brotherhood and amity."
...reading his views on AI could be amusing and enlightening. Or maybe not.
You can write a coruscating critique in the comments. Or not. As is your wont.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bmimatt on Thursday December 12, @07:36PM (6 children)
I guess it is safe to assume that whatever he predicts will have exactly opposite result when the prediction reaches the right place on the timeline and materializes.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 12, @09:59PM (1 child)
Stephen Fry is an extremely funny guy, and not at all to be taken seriously about anything.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Thursday December 12, @11:04PM
But he is accurate, just in 180 degrees sort of way :)
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 12, @10:13PM
Quoting Stephen himself:
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 12, @10:16PM (2 children)
Here, with John Cleese in the lead, is another view of Stephen Fry, worth the time IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ9W_Pq3v0Q [youtube.com]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pdfernhout on Friday December 13, @03:52PM (1 child)
Building on the shoulders of giants like Albert Einstein, Bucky Fuller, Lewis Mumford, and others, here is my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
If we use tools of abundance like AI in a competitive and hateful way, they will likely doom us. If we instead use them in a spirit of love and sharing, they might bring abundance and joy for all.
We need to recognize the ironic humor of the situation to make healthy progress.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 13, @05:20PM
Healthy progress seems to ebb and flow like the tides of fashion, or phases of the moon.
Unfortunately for positive AI applications, we may have been overdue for a pendulum swing to the dark side. Maybe we can use technology to swing back more quickly than previously.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Deep Blue on Thursday December 12, @08:41PM (19 children)
Never heard that phrase before. Searched it, found it. Ok then.
The thing with "AI" is that it's glorified to be more than it is at the moment. And that grinds my gears. Before the "AI" can give the promised results, it is just a toy, but can be a dangerous toy. It can cause job lost among other things, before it is even capable of replacing people at their job and the affects have been fully considered. The hyping does not help at all.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday December 12, @09:06PM (10 children)
If AI does become significantly better, it could replace all human jobs. 100% unemployment. People wouldn't have to work. Machines would produce everything.
On the other hand, the greed of the rich is unlimited. They would be happy to let everyone starve if they can't pay for what the machines independently freely produce. Let them eat machine parts.
On the third hand, if the machines could truly think, they might put a stop to this.
It's too bad the future is so unknown. And randomness has a very random effect on our lives.
And as for dangerous toys, as you say, the military loves dangerous toys. As long as they are dangerous to certain people.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12, @09:12PM (1 child)
But who would they flaunt all their riches to? The machines won't care.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday December 12, @09:34PM
I mean surely they will have people Zoos in the future. Where the rich people can go to see how people used to behave. Kind of like the whole Alien gathering specimens for their collection and retrieving humans for it. Except, a lot more realistic and dystopian.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 12, @10:00PM (2 children)
"They would be happy to let everyone starve"
Except no they wouldn't, because starving people with nothing to lose become cannibalistic mobs with absolutely nothing to lose.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Thursday December 12, @11:08PM (1 child)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kell on Thursday December 12, @11:30PM
Except they won't. They need consumers now to buy their products and give them money in order to get labour from those same people. The robots will provide labour and ask nothing but the minimum to function in return. Post-scarcity, the people who "own" the capital will not need consumers and will be tempted to liquidate them as they will no longer serve their needs and... well... because humans suck like that. The key thing here is to move past the idea that ownership of capital implies the right to deny others its bounty - all the atoms were here before we were, so why should some accident of history mean some humans get life-long luxury for no effort, while others are left to starve to death? Once robots are producing nigh-unlimited abundance, humanity as a whole needs to realise that this is an unacceptable outcome and change how we understand wealth, ownership, and resources. When the robots effortlessly produce a mountain of smartphones, a single human saying "that's my mountain and you can't have any!" gets pretty silly. Even moreso if we're talking about a mountain of perishable food. All humans need to benefit from the economic surplus of end-to-end automated productivity.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Thursday December 12, @11:06PM (2 children)
ChatGPT was first opened to the public as a service by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. So it's been 2 years and I don't see competent coders being replaced by LLMs anytime soon.
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Friday December 13, @01:39PM (1 child)
It's not just coders under threat, it's anything that the "AI" can produce text and images and videos for. Subtitle makers (i just used an "AI" program to create subtitles to some shows, needed quite a lot of fixing and they still are just OK), all kinds of translators, specification makers etc, ad artist, anyone making videos.
I just had a job interview and i had to make this test and i got an "AI" created "what to improve and what's good"-document. Some of that was accurate, some not so. I was told that part does not matter, it was the factual test results that do.
And as the current "AI" does not recognize facts, but some of it is just randomized away to prevent repetive texts, it can cause problems. Some people are still ready to jump in to it head on.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Friday December 13, @06:34PM
As "AI" produces more content and then ingests it for learning, we'll likely face a "garbage in, garbage out" scenarios.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday December 13, @01:41AM
On the fourth hand, most of the AIs in science and speculative fiction end up going nuts. And even with a somewhat intelligent military ally, you can't be sure which people they'll be dangerous to, even with very clear instructions [schlockmercenary.com].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 13, @03:42PM
Why would that happen? Human-only economies are the norm today and have been so for longer than the written word. So it's definitely not that humans can't do the work or organize themselves productively. Consider this phrase from the next paragraph:
If greedy, rich guy's machines don't make our food and such, then why aren't our own machines making the food? It's "freely produced" right? One of things missed here is that AI (at least in this scenario) doesn't just improve the bottom line of greedy, rich people., it improves the value of my labor as well.
This boils down to human agency. IF you have it, then it doesn't matter if greedy, rich guy is there. You choose to better your life anyway and you do. IF you don't have agency, then of course, you're at the whims of greedy, rich guy, SkyNet, and whatever else is out there making your decisions for you.
Rather than the "AI will make things so cheaply that I can't afford them" argument, let's consider what would cause us to lose agency: we could hand off too much military power to bad parties; we could create a bunch of artificial scarcity; we could undermine the value of human labor; and so on.
This last part is why I incidentally support more freedom for businesses. Heavy regulation creates artificial scarcity and diminishes our agency. It's also why I oppose universal basic income. That creates dependency which again diminishes our agency.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 12, @10:01PM (4 children)
>that it's glorified to be more than it is at the moment. And that grinds my gears.
Surprising you have any gears left at this point, overhyping new technology before it has demonstrated any value at all has become a decades long tradition, virtually an expectation of every serious effort at launching the next Unicorn onto the stock exchanges of the world.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Friday December 13, @01:43PM (3 children)
The AI gears are pretty much gone, true. Same with the blockchain gears.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 13, @05:09PM (2 children)
Oh, there are actual valuable applications of block chain, even as a record of stored value. Nothing you will read in the press, certainly nothing even remotely related to proof of work, but block chains are inherently transparent, and driving that transparency into business processes is very valuable.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Friday December 13, @07:26PM (1 child)
I'm sure there are, there will be good, valuable applications for even this level of "AI", not to mention real AI, but the hype hype hype and the religious BS has pretty much killed it for me. Sure, i've tried creating some images with "AI", none of which were usable, and did some subtitles with an "AI" program, which worked better than nothing, but yeah.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 13, @08:02PM
Somewhat dark story: I observed something disturbing in a group home visit that I decided to try to "sketch" with AI. A normally active, happy, interactive ~30 year old "client" was sitting in the darkened living room, upright in a dining chair, wearing nothing but his diaper and staring straight ahead at a blank wall. Disturbing enough as it was, but when I returned 3 hours later he had not moved. (The next day he was back to his normal self.)
I worked with an AI system to sketch the scene, but when it came to showing him wearing nothing but a diaper the AI refused stating "the image might depict abuse." Well, F-yeah it depicts abuse, that's why I need it, and it's not sexual abuse it's chemical restraints... useless piece of crap. It did eventually relent and give me a picture of a man in shorts looking somewhat like the scene, though it felt obliged to put a "wifebeater" undershirt on the sketched subject even though I didn't mention it.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13, @12:53AM
It would be kind of embarrassing if humans experience near extinction just because of "autocomplete" on nukes.
Compared to say the Skynet scenario where the AI actually intentionally tries to wipe out humans...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13, @01:03AM (1 child)
May I assume you have never worked in marketing/advertising?
(Score: 2) by Deep Blue on Friday December 13, @01:50PM
You may. I'm not the salesman type.
(Score: 4, Informative) by jelizondo on Thursday December 12, @09:22PM (5 children)
Can't write a coruscating critique if you don't freaking link to the actual talk [youtube.com], can we?
(Score: 4, Funny) by pTamok on Thursday December 12, @09:39PM (3 children)
You are completely correct. I am an idiot.
If you had asked me before I had read your posting, I would have been sure that I had, in the submission, posted a link to the text/script of his talk on Substack.
The Fry Corner: AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End? [substack.com]
Something went wrong - I just checked the submission, and it is sans link, and this was not noticed by the crack team of SoylentNews editors.
Please accept my apologies, and I hope a kind editor will add the link to the story, and possibly your kindly provided link to the video.
(Score: 3, Touché) by jelizondo on Thursday December 12, @10:36PM
No apology needed, being Thursday everyone starts thinking of the weekend!
Cheers
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday December 12, @11:27PM (1 child)
Done
.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday December 13, @09:31AM
Thank you very much, and apologies for somehow missing it out first time around.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 12, @10:03PM
Recommend skipping to 10:50, unless you like hearing 10:50 of introductions.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday December 12, @10:02PM (2 children)
No computer does anything without power. Right now, all the methods of feeding data centers power rely to some degree on humans to maintain them and keep them charged. And despite futurist pronouncements, that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Ergo, there is always an off switch.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 13, @02:55AM
There's always an off switch until the automatic security systems are network attached.
Or, you can follow a plot similar to Transcendent.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13, @09:26AM
There's a rather old movie (but a classic) that you need to watch. It's called The Forbin Project. [imdb.com]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday December 13, @10:22AM (2 children)
It was called that before Carl Benz was born. According to the Wiki, the syllable "benz" in this case ultimately derives from the Arabic lubān jāwī. German "Benzin" was coined in 1833 by Eilhardt Mitscherlich based on Benzoesäure.
On the talk, it's a pretty decent analysis (and a good vocabulary-training occasion for the reader), merely his conclusion in the last paragraphs on how to handle the issues is delusional.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday December 13, @06:59PM
I agree. Fry is not stupid. He is also very good at telling stories in an amusing way. Which makes the last paragraphs odd, because either it reveals a lack of in-depth thought, or he thinks it is what actually needs to be done, and he has not dressed it up.
The idea that "no Ai be ever allowed to masquerade" is actually not a bad one, and use of an Ai without signalling that you are using an Ai becomes illegal. This harks back to Turing's 'Imitation Game', where, for a machine to 'win', it either has to lie, or believe itself to be human. Perhaps this is the way to avoid the Butlerian Jihad [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15, @03:37AM
I always thought it was because the gas contained benzene, or that they used to use benzene as a primary fuel. Turns out gas does contain some benzene as an anti-knocking agent. Just as gas also used to contain tetraethyllead and was referred to sometimes as "ethyl" even though it was just an additive. So my assumption seemed reasonable at the time; but if you've fully researched the etymology I'll defer to that of course.