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pTamok [soylentnews.org] writes:

The text of a talk Stephen Fry [wikipedia.org] 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:

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.

Original Submission