Stephen Fry describing our future with artificial intelligence and robots

um I'm past and also about technology and very interested noise have been two of the primal and most loved Greek myths to do with the creation of mankind it starts with the creation of the gods what he said cause that's Theogony the birth of the gods but then our champion the Titan Prometheus made human beings in clay and you this this bit of Zeus and the breath of Athena gave them life but Zeus refused to allow us to have fire and the fire I think means both literal fire to allow us to become Bronze Age man to create weapons and to cook meat and to to frighten the the fierce animals and to to become the strongest physically and technically but also the internal fire of self-consciousness and creativity the divine fire and Zeus didn't want us to have it and Prometheus stole fire from heaven gave it to man and Zeus was so angry that he punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountainside and he was immortal Prometheus every day his liver was torn out by an eagle and it grew back and every day was torn out again and for perpetuity until he was rescued by Heracles now I mentioned this and the other punishment mmm was that Zeus and the other gods created Pandora the all gifted that is what Pandora all gifted and sent her down as the first woman she had everything but he also gave her this jar which we sometimes called a box yeah which actually was the mistaken translation of a very famous nether landish intellectual called Erasmus aha who mistook the Latin pitocin peak was the two words and so he translated it as a box but it should actually be a jar but Pandora came to earth if you remember and she was told that she wouldn't look into the jar and she was beautiful she had everything all the gifts of all the gods were given to her but she had this curiosity and she opened the jar and I'm sure you all know the story out flue hardship lies deceit murder pestilence all the ills of the world and the Golden Age was over she slammed the lid back on and one little fairy was left inside Elpis hope now that's fine that seems like an interesting story it's an interpretation but actually if you think about it at the present firstly the Prometheus story as soon as mankind shook off the chains of religion and the church we became incredibly interested in the Prometheus story because it suddenly said we don't have to bow down and apologize to a god gods have to apologise to us for denying us our independence and our sense of ourselves and our fire and so Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound the poem Beethoven wrote a Prometheus overture all within five years of each other the the bit height of the enlightenment if you like and the beginning of the Romantic era now I'm going to put that to one side but then I'm going to go back to 1989 when I became fascinated by this extraordinary new development in which you could Network computers to a network of networks which was starting to be called the Internet there was no web there was no graphical application it was all text-based but I was really excited by it and as it grew I became more and more excited I thought this is the biggest and most exciting bringing together of human beings in the history of our planet it is going to it is the all gifted it will give us freedom of access to knowledge we will share things art politics boundaries will be dissolved we will learn to love each other we will all be brothers like in Beethoven's 9th you know we will all be brothers it would be fantastic and social media came and the Arab Spring and I thought there will be no more tribalism no more hatred no more racism this would be wonderful but what happened the lid opened and out came trolls out came abusers out came racists and tribalists and insulters and the worst kind of humanity it was an exact replay of Pandora's box and I thought that was so interesting that the Greeks had this understanding that when we have something that seems perfect there is no possibility but that it also contains its opposite and now this is the host important part I'm sorry dude one more god this gods your mouth is the most important part I guarantee you whether you'd like to think it or not that although we know through Darwin and science and genes that we were not created by an intelligent designer in a hundred years time we can guarantee there will be sapient creatures sapient beings on this earth that have been intelligently designed you can call them robots you can call them compounds of augmented biology and artificial intelligence but they will exist the first person to live to 200 years old has already been born the future is enormous it's never been more existentially transformative my question is this when the Prometheus who makes the first really impressive piece of robotic AI like Frankenstein but like Prometheus back in the Greek myth they will have a question do we give it fire do we give these creatures self-knowledge self-consciousness an autonomy that is greater than any other machine has ever had and would be similar to ours in other words shall we be Zeus and deny them fire because we afraid of them because they will destroy us and the Greeks and the human beings did destroy the gods they no longer needed them and it is very possible we will create a race of sapient beings who will not need us and will there be as imperfect as we are almost certainly yeah I hope so yeah but we will be redundant

Channel: Wondere Wereld

Views: 178,664

Rating: 4.8968778 out of 5

Keywords: fry, ai, vandis, artificial intelligence, mythology, prometheus

Id: c0Ody-HLvTk

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Cashbill]

Wow! Thanks for sharing this. This was a very succinct explanation of the past and future of humanity.

[u/VRPat]

I love this. It reminded me of what Richard Feynman wrote in "The Value of Science".

He wrote that he had visited a Buddhist temple in Honolulu.

"The man in charge explained a little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and ended his talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would never forget - and I have never forgotten it. It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven;

the same key opens the gates of hell."

[u/ProfDoctorEscalator]

Psychiatrist: How does that make you feel?

[u/idiotdidntdoit]

Holy shit that was amazing.

[u/Karate_Prom]

99.9% agree but why does Fry think AI will be just as flawed as humans? I see them being morally superior since they'd have access to and perfect recall of human history and therefore can clearly see no benefit in repeating past atrocities that were executed based off of ignorance and misunderstanding.

[u/servuslucis]

The true value of Greek mythology is that you can take almost any epic and make it mean anything for any subject.