Stephen Fry Interview on Digital Language

very good now so I'll chat to Steven a bit we can have another video I just even a bit more will then do all the winners which will be very exciting and then we're going to have bring the audience in so you can chat to Steven as well that's basically the format the first question I've got Steven is is it is a tough one is a are you going to take your coat off well I thought I'd rather cool in my coat Julius but we excite wide you might just bugger off yeah I might check it off then go on I'll leave he's in a puddle underneath me there it is nice and warm in apples ah yeah it's fine the the and the second thing I'd like to say and I think on behalf of us all in the Apple Store is congratulations oh thank you thank you very much I'll bless you thank you my my ring it's very exciting I'm probably any person who's ever got married so I can tell you is really excited it's great it's thrilling I'm very happy I'm it's but it was quite an interesting moment here we are going to talk about technology and you know the marriage you were outed so to speak because of Technology well not strictly true well the marriage I outed myself using technology but in fact the engagement was had been a long-standing and I went to a registry office and they explained that the announcement had to go up and so somewhere on a small piece of paper in a municipal building in Norwich was my name in the name of my now husband and still feels good yesterday and that was that was picked up somebody saw that and they told the press about that so that was very old-school but when it came marvelously the registrar who was extremely on our side with our desire not to have photographers and journalists at the actual ceremony she brilliantly hid of false put a false date in the computer so that anybody who hacked it or sneakily looked at it who shouldn't would think we were going to be married on the 7th of March and she didn't tell anybody else what the real day was so we managed to get married without a single journalist present but then yes I tweeted a picture of ourselves saying you know that we've gone in as separate people and come out as one and that sort of put it under our control it meant that the press would no longer be following us because you can't really pretend that the press aren't interested in something although it seems very vain to try and control the press if you don't they will control you so it's pretty necessary and that actually Twitter for the last seven or eight years that I've been on it it is wonderful to know that I don't have to do certain interviews and profiles because I have more followers than the circulation of that newspaper which is really I know it's terrible but it's very very good to know yeah it's steering towards a spot of megalomania yeah I'm sorry but it's just Andy did you have a first dance um yes you know who see me dance wouldn't have called it a dance exactly but it was a shuffle what was the tune I had wanted to choose the tune written by al jolson it's the only great tune he wrote as far as I know he had some great hits of course like California here I come and as you know Sammy and you know it was a Sonny Boy and and so on but he did write one called Oh how we danced on the night that we Wed but I couldn't get it on my eye i performing things which might or may not have been an apple thing which I wouldn't want to suggest that I'm in any way in hock to Apple it could easily be known an Android device that unfortunately I'm not a total idiot so no shush okay so yeah it was I kind of sure yes no it was Cole Porter um very good thank you that's that yeah so um to your autobiography or your memoir whatever you wish to call it the third in the series I did John Humphries is a very great man at the BBC he's brilliant at interviewing people when I start at the BBC I asked him you know what's the trick of what's the trick of a good interview he says keep the question short this is done by the way yeah and this is an anecdote more than a question and I said well what do you mean he said we'll just ask did it start with one word why and then build it from there necessary yes well Kipling's had the what is it the five W's in the and the H wasn't it why what when why what when how where yeah the journalist questions here so so the question on on the third memoir is why it's a really good question um and short very short contractual obligation is one reason of course but also pride I got so far with with one book and then a second that take me up to a and of real hinge in my life and I thought well I've got to press on with this even though it's pretty it's an unfortunate period in my life in many ways it's well very successful in worldly terms I was doing lots of films and television and and writing some but also in social and personal terms it was pretty much a disaster I was alone and lonely and and I had taken to regular supply of cocaine which who had that quite explicit I do yeah I've never seen the point of writing a memoir which isn't honest at least as honest as one can make it without producing other people who's you know it's not my business too much to mention other people or to destroy their reputations or indeed to just mention them in any way who if they don't want to be so it's really I'm the only one I can attack I'm the only one I can assault and and describe and dissect even if I can't do it necessarily accurately I can always say I think anybody who's ever tried to write an autobiography you can always say what happened but you can very rarely say why which the spectator sees more of the game I think my friends and family probably know better than I do why I behaved in certain ways or and certainly the effect of it and all I can do is remember what I did but it's very hard to remember why I mean I know the other really difficult thing I would imagine is how to self edit what to put in what to put not to put in now you said you obviously you don't you don't to put stuff in there which is going to put other people in and awkward position but you also have to make a decision what you yourself decide to put in and what you decide to not put in other than I suppose you want to entertain people what what is what is the criteria for you I suppose in the end the criterion I've always had and it's one that I'm not necessarily proud of because it stops me ever being an artist or a person of great authenticity is what's entertaining I am primarily an entertainer and I admire artists more than almost any other type of human being and the ones I know and I think I mentioned this in the book the ones I know have a strength of character and of a directness which is to me very or inspiring very impressive and I can never be that brave so I think the criterion is that it is what is I hope entertaining if it becomes dull or it becomes disgusting and turns into something that repels people rather than in trances them then I'm not really interested in conveying it now you spend a lot of time in the public eye hmm both as a writer presenter comedian actor all all of the above right it strikes me writing a memoir make it's particularly vulnerable that people aren't just criticizing the work of art they're criticizing the person yeah yeah the person they don't necessarily know but they thought you in the moment yeah I've projected a personality that people imagine that they know and they can judge me rightly according to that and we all do it even if you hear don't do it to me you probably do it too and Whitaker moans you know or David Cameron or something like that people you may not have met but you have a strong view of and you might have there every time they appear on television or you might go WOW god I love them and in both cases they're it's it's a prejudgment it is prejudiced in its literal sense and we all are guilty of prejudice and there's one of the nature's of celebrities that we prejudge celebrities according to our own taste it's either revulsion or disgust or something similar or dislike or course it can be indifference or it can be absolute love hero worship and in all cases it's it's not necessarily right but it speaks to something we need I need heroes so there are people I worship and there can be as distinct and different as I don't know Martina Navratilova and Brian I don't know Richard Fineman say that scientists of dead I can worship them I don't I mean I know a bit about their lives and for all I know I wouldn't really like them that much if I knew them well III too late to know Richard Fineman well but I met Martina Navratilova but I don't really want to know any better because there's certain things about it I just find uh turley admirable and it's partly I think that that she's so different from me she doesn't care what some seem to care what people think of her I have a terrible fault in how much I care about what people think of me it's disastrous and I really try and do something about it and my friends say oh please come on Steven this why are you so upset about this they're just who is it they've just said this about you why should you care but again no I shouldn't care but I want everybody to love me everybody in the world is preposterous it's so silly that is setting yourself up to fail it is yeah but but with that in mind why do more and more memoirs because you are asking for it are you not yeah and and maybe it is psychological desire to be spanked in public all I can say is that I do desire when I have a metaphorical these days pen in my hand you know a keyboard under my fingers I I feel a connection to all writers or whether it's grub Street or whether it is you know the highest Gerrits of of the of the finest you know writers in the world you know the greatest novel is gradual you know essayist Montaigne in his Tower or what know whether it's Balzac in his is scribbling away or whoever it might be I feel connected to them not necessarily in talent but in that there is a sacred duty when you're a writer which is to try and write the truth as you see it just as a painter looks out of the window looks up from his easel looks across at the subject he's painting or she's painting and is struggling all the time to to find the way to represent the truth of what they see and and it's similar with a with with writing the only difficulty especially with a book because you get one out in a year or whatever it is and then you wait a little bit is and I can say this of your fright and and it's you know two books is that of the first one the FRA chronicles I think I was in a really reasonably happy state when I wrote it in your friar was in I was in what can only be described as a mixed state and I know that if I were to write about that period of my life now and it's not much later I would have written a completely different book I could even do that which would be asking a bit much of the public to lash out a lot of the similar book or these little book covering temperance I think it would be less I think it I think it would pay less attention to the cocaine or at least the attention it paid to it would be more more self forgiving less self lacerating it would just lay it on with less of a trowel if you like attach a lighter touch exactly well that's a good way of putting it which doesn't mean I regret the way it was written because when you it's a bit it's a bit like what what they say over period movies is that any period movie tells you an enormous amount about the period in which it was made not about the period in which it is set so if you watch Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby for example it tells you everything about his period of the nauseous everything you did look at it every frame of it is from that period more or less our age now if you look at the if you look at the redford one with the mia farrow it says it's just so early eighties it's ridiculous all of them use the right makeup the flappers the music everything to try and create their age but they they just tell you about the age in which they're made only and the book which was written in the age which it was set tells you everything about its age and about our age because it's such an extraordinary work of art but it's true of my book as well is that I read the book I all I can think of is not the period that it's describing that the period in which I wrote but part of that period of course is this thing within which we're all living through at the moment this digital revolution and you made that part of your book I you asked people in a way I suppose this is analogous to sort of fanfiction you asked your readers to respond and create their own stories yes off the back of that how did how did that process feel when it was fascinating and when when penguin asked if I was up for this I first had to just find out exactly what kind of thing they had in mind because it's quite a difficult it's a the whole idea of your fries a bit like trying to just clutch a salmon the heart of the harder you grasp the further it flies away because it's it's not you know it is it's not just oh let's make it multimedia it's you know it's it's sort of more subtle than that it is asking for an artistic approach towards the materials to in in digital language it's there the content is there and it's there in two forms text which manipulated endlessly as we know these days in all kinds of ways and a sound file because I did the the audio book for both of these and I was very excited because I I think it's wonderful to send out to creative people around the world and Tom mentioned you know bare roots and New Delhi as well as Ukraine and and Paris and Berlin and obviously here in Britain was such extraordinary talent in Scotland and England Wales and indeed Northern Ireland and Ireland for that matter I what I wanted to see it's nice and work for the BBC and you know very go be so correct about it all but what it is when you sit down write a book you engage all of your emotions and all of your senses you try and you try and evoke all the senses of smell and taste and you trying to vote music and images and so on all using text and that's the beauty of a book is that by reading the text the text comes alive in your head and you see pictures and you smell smells and you feel feelings and you hear noises and you are transported into the world that the writer is attempting to evoke and and said that's very good and it's not the one wants to move away from that or say that that's old-fashioned and that we have to have a new new form of storytelling narratives will always have new media behind them of course but what was great was finding these two staples audio and text and using the background of the various potentials like the web of course and and other such things and touch technologies and all kinds of other things to to bring it all alive and above all and you'll see this when when we mention those who who've most excited us the panel including you will so you'll know them leavened by a truly great human quality which is wit and some of them are genuinely very funny and that means they've been taken seriously because people without a sense of humor just don't take the world seriously enough that's Oscar pointed out he did um we should have a look at some before before we do that does it has anybody in you didn't read in the audience contribute to the you for I project yeah got that one two three yeah well it look very good it was it was it fun yeah I mean it's what's quite interesting about the concept is that the the book is a starting point on then yes I suppose that completely yeah very well okay can we can we have a look at some of the some of the submissions please it begs the obvious question Stephen is it in general terms what was your reaction to what you saw I was astonished by how varied and how intelligent and as I said witty and totally unpredictable all the all the entries were that I looked at it's just that you said beforehand that in a way when you're writing a memoir it actually other people are better judges and can contribute more now here's an example of people being able to do just that what did people add say thing do which gave you another view of yourself well it's interesting they concentrated on four elements that Tom mentioned actually mental health sexuality education and it's going to be another one isn't it the diction thank you damn I wanted to forget that one I was cured then you said addiction Oh Dan and addiction yeah and that they used parts of parts of the text parts of my voice that I hadn't realized were so relevant to those areas and they created a sort of emotional rhythm in across the different pieces that surprised me enormous ly and delighted me and what do you think of technology as a creative enabler both from a good perspective and maybe from a negative perspective well I think I've enormous faith in human beings desire and appetite for knowledge and to communicate knowledge and to communicate knowledge and experience artistically to create art if you like and new technology will come along the obvious example that everybody naturally chooses is in 1450 when Gutenberg printed his first Bible and by 1500 any 50 years later that there was something like 50 million printed books in Europe which given the population and the mechanical printing time is astounding it is well equivalent of the explosion in the in the web after 94 and and Tim berners-lee's crazy invention was rolled out across the world I think there will always be those who are very doubtful and who think that the human brain can't cope but I would say this about the human brain it is more miraculous than even the person who most thinks it were a cutest can claim I was thinking only the other day I had been in the country and I was standing in a field in Norfolk and were huge skies and it was calm and I was looking at a cop's of Littlewood and I could instantly pick up if a little little fret of wind turned the leaf and now he saw it silver the silver reverse of the leaf or or a bird rocketed out of the out of the wood of course my whole brain was totally programmed to respond to these things in in the countryside a thing that might be possible food or a thing that might possibly want to eat me that's that's what we're programmed and that's natural okay that's the human brain that we understand that but three hours later I was standing in the Oxford Street and there were thousands and thousands of people coming at me in colors that just were completely unpredictable 100 years ago they were never seen such colors that people could wear and I was on the phone talking to someone who was miles and miles away and my brain was perfectly capable of processing everything I didn't even know I was pressing as it was anyone I stopped and compared what had what I'd experienced in the Norfolk comes said that's how astonishing our brain is so when the monks said in 1460 that the human memory is going to be destroyed by printing we no longer will people have to know anything they can look it up in a book and that will destroy the human brain well we laugh because what a ridiculous thing to say we know that in fact the human memory was immeasurably enhanced by the arrival of printing and so it is with the digital world people have said well now there's Wikipedia people won't know anything because they'll just look it up they know far more than they've ever known ever it's fantastic we have more knowledge at our fingertips then Napoleon had in libraries in Sun Tzu's anywhere anywhere he had more than Alexander the Great more than louis louis xiv more than any great monarch you can think of or any great leader but in it in a way steven is not the miraculous nature of human brain isn't its ability to consume information is what it does with it absolutely civility to imagine process it and realize those imaginations to be creative absolutely absolutely right i was merely just saying that as a sort of foretaste of really just to remember how remarkable our brains are and remember how you know they're not vulnerable to some sort of strange destruction by the nature of the digital world or anymore than they were by television if you remember all those people there was you were old enough to remember how television was going to soften the brain video games we're going to soften the brain and now the online world and spending your time in social networking and so on is going to soften the brain it doesn't it sharpens it it may be very tedious if people do it over the table when you're trying to have a dinner party or something it's very annoying you want to slap people put it away on you would want to drop it into the washing up sink and see their faces it out we've revenge the speakers here are fantastic i'm going to take them home and that'll show my neighbor who's boss anyway so when they good so but yes there was a time I'm Douglas Adams who was always the ghost at these feasts which which talk about the future and the nature of the digital world I remember him years and years and years ago saying that he had had which had sort of inherited from his father a book called the boys wonder book of science and the boys wonder book of science was written in the late 30s around the time that come up with the DC motor there's electric motor and it was America was a one thing and it meant you could plug a motor into the wall and it could power things rather than having to use a you know internal combustion engine to power the motor or steam it could just go off the off the mains and it showed a house of the nineteenth late 1950s early sixties which they imagined which would sort of cut away and it had a huge electric motor in the Attic and wheels and belts going off it and it was powering everything washing machines photographs you know gramophones it was everything was being powered by this electric motor and basically what the article was saying is we're all going to have to be electric motor literate yeah what it didn't see was that there there would be electric motors in washing machines in gramophones in the cassette recorders in whatever everything then had tiny tiny little electric motors we never think about we don't have to be electric motor literate and Douglass's point was it's the same with this idea of computer illiteracy you don't have to be computer literate because the computers just get smaller and smaller and smaller we think of the Internet of Things or the Internet of everything it's sometimes called we just are allowed to get on with it and perhaps a better image in terms of creativity is driving it used to be in the days of drive motor early motoring used to have to know how a car worked you really did you every 10 miles or so you have to get under it and tweak the magneto and just the carburation and all this kind of thing and and then off you go again and then you crank it up and that's how computers still out is something that we're still in the early days of motor computers but we're more and more capable of driving without really knowing how computers work we don't have to adjust the memory stack we don't have to suddenly write a piece of a patch in machine code in order to domen something we may rely on others to do that in system updates whatever but essentially all we have to do is drive and once you drive with minimum kind of interference and minimum bother once you drive in terms of sound and vision which we mostly can now and in terms of editing in which we saw be visually process.we orderly process and we text process there is there's very little to limit our our imaginations but the most important thing I think is that you have to be a consumer in order to be a provider and if you want to know how to write a play it is central you go to the theater it's absolutely pointless no not going to the theater going to be a novelist you don't you don't you can't be unaware of other novelists it makes no sense it's almost impossible you're going to be a great novelist unless you have read other great novelists it not that because you copied them but because you get some sense of the the terrain that you want to be in so it's really important to enjoy the works of others I think last question before we do the define lists again I said of a creative district question what's your view on copyright well I did a Apple event an iTunes event at the Roundhouse some years ago in which I said some reason we firmly and got some stick for it especially amongst my own fellow performers I said look with all this stuff around we have to we have to realize that yes systematic abuse of copyright is a very bad thing for gain but and this was happening at the time but to jump on students and young people doing compilation tapes not not providing peer-to-peer networks which really do take the piss out of copyright but just individuals I said well you could have done that to me when I was 16 I would borrow people's records and I would do a cassette compilation I bet you did yeah who didn't we stole music we were pirates we should have been imprisoned well do you know what the moment I was old enough and had enough money to buy things I bought them but if I'd been threatened with imprisonment and if I'd had friends have been in prison for doing compilation tapes I would have thought you music industry you're ourselves you really are ourselves you're picking on young individual people who love music and that's wrong you shouldn't let them let them make compilations and mixes from their friends stuff let them let them rip CDs and swap it occasionally amongst their friends long as they're not making money off it as long as it you know that they're not really making money of it you know that when they're older they will be buyers they will be your best customers and they will like you and they will believe in music and they'll believe in downloading music properly but so so just don't attack the you know the citizens of tomorrow who will be who will be decent that's my idea well on that passionately even let's have a look at the the four shortlisted winners money winners of the people who took your copyright and I thought yesterday that were very welcome to it so let's have a look yes you'll be doing them one by one though so well the number one it is not in order of number one or number one just the first one we're showing is from Michael shorter and it's called a touch of fry note the word touch what shape that could get quite filthy quite quickly wonderful I added about you I'm just stunned by the sort of screen-printing aspect of it this the you know soldiering would be one thing and I go gosh solving that's really geeky and it's so impressive but but but you know to use this sort of black gunk as a circuit it was beautiful apart anything else and so flat anyway charming and wonderful so let's have a look at the second one which is called Matt fry and it's they can't sadly be here it's by Evgenia shrio Allah and Mikhail mallesh King I hope I pronounced those right and here they are from from the Ukraine mm that's a real beauty to play with that one and actually wonders you can even care and reading their work it's gone really stunning it just everything just seamlessly and beautifully connects so whatever piece of text you've chosen you just chase this beautiful little flowing thing that goes all the way through through the web and so one ideas it is it's like a Ignatius you know sent Elmo's fire you know which is little pockets of methane in a Martian and one of them gets lit then another one gets lit and the the illusion is of a trace going all the way along you know what I mean yeah yeah anyway so the next one is called speaking fry and I think you'll find it amusing it's by Paul Hudson I'm very very glad they didn't choose the slightly ruder ones that River but they're using there's a sort of like icon to database of phrases that that were regarded as being signature phrases or something similar and they were chosen so quickly you may not have seen the whole list of them because there's a sort of guess ahead things as you type a shorter number is available for you to choose from because you've chosen the word could or something so all the ones with the word could or couldn't in it are chosen anyway it's very very quickly learned we're making obviously as you can see from its user interface we make a very natural iOS app anyway and so the fourth week and have a look at is the book of bipolarity by sarah Wagle wonderful did you get that right yeah very much so I mean it's a it's extraordinary as you said it that piece to try and get in my head to nod thought that people try and get in your head but then that's what writers are asking people to do and and this project more than any other of course and I think you did it superbly Jewish work next on the thing my friend William Goldman the screenwriter has always said it's a disgrace that there's no irony font and it's desperately needed in Twitter if you can do anything but unfortunately needs going to ASCII I think doesn't it who control the you know the the assignation of characters in in standard text is all done by ASCII and so we need them desperately because otherwise there's going to be a murder on the basis of a misplaced piece of irony of all the things you do acting presenting writing comedy which one if you had if you could only do one well I think writing is the most satisfying I mean come on stage after a sum of something that the audience is light and it's a nice feeling is definitely quite high but there's always something that I don't know it's there's an embarrassment because there are other people there but writing the very bad thing about it is that it's lonely but the very good thing is that when you've had a good day at the desk this you're stretching and hoping that your back hasn't ruined and you feel so wonderful it's fantastic it's the best feeling in the world I saw you in Twelfth Night Steven and you were a magnificent I really hope you don't drop that right who would like to ask Stephen Fry a question he's all yours for the next 10 minutes or so we've got microphones there's no need to be shy he's not remotely secure they're not try they're just girding up their lines who elevated wave their hand and a gramophone will come to them there's a guy there yeah yeah hi Stephen I'm just a quick question are you conscious with your writing now around the various different mediums that are available or would you adapt afterwards for example with audio or with what we see in this evening that's a good question I do know when I write a book that I'm going to have to do the audiobook for it but that I I like that fact and I have to say ever since since I started writing I have always I've always felt the sound of words and the rhythm of them to be very important and so I yes I can remember my first novel the lie I can remember very clearly standing up with print out and and and saying whole pages are not even knowing I would do an audiobook really then so there is a strong feeling of the sound as for other things now I hadn't really imagined it was really with the Frey Chronicles that it it all kicked off in terms of multimedia in quite that way and I remember penguin were very pleased because it was the first book that was number one as hardback as a an app as an audiobook as there were two other categories I can't remember what they were but there were four five categories in which it was in which it was in the market and doing well which was very pleasing but I think I you know people will always want something in their lab to read and I think people now really more than ever as well like to walk with a book or drive with a book or iron or sit in a bath you know with it with an audio book as well I think there's two go together very well do you prefer the printed page to read from or do you prefer an iPad or a Kindle or whatever it might be I'm happy with both at home it's nearly always the printed word but when traveling simply you know ebook is is well-named electrons as we remember from school have - charge and whatever spin but but they have no mass or at least their mass is tiny it is I believe the mass electrons that is part of the big quest for the Higgs boson so we might or the field of it we mustn't claim there's no mass but essentially according to any machine any of us have got they've got no mass what I'm really saying is shove an iPad with no books on it on the scale and it weighs X shove an iPad with a thousand books on the scale and it weighs X and you any of us who've tried to carry more than three books in our luggage around the world will know how much real atomic books way and it was Nicholas Negroponte his book being digital that really unwrapped that whole thing about living in an atomic molecular world where things are made of stuff yeah they're made of iron and paper and wood and whatever else it is or an electronic world where they are made of nothing nothing palpable that need warriors do you think the experience is the same mode no I don't exactly but on the other hand I think again it's part of the human brains brilliance is that we consider on an aeroplane with an iPad or a Kindle or whatever the choice and very quickly if the books any good we're sunk into the book and it's it stops mattering really does I think it would only matter enormous Lee in a book that isn't very good I mean you know there are those who say you couldn't read you have to read Ulysses in the bottle ahead edition otherwise it's just not the same well yeah but frankly if you've got no other option but the penguin edition or some other edition it's still the same great novel it's not going to it's not going to fail to deliver who's read Ulysses the bodily head edition this is yes or Jane Austen in the oxidation where they have the extra little that they had the first word of the next page on the foot animation that's a lovely addition on oxford india paper it's beautiful there you go yeah another question please hi I wonder snow we ever at we had super kind of letting like other people but it'd be like your own words of this color for ball was it more exciting well you're sitting next to my editor she does nothing but manipulate my words no she is extremely good no I was very excited about the idea of people manipulating my words because I knew that the books would still exist in whatever forms the ebook and the and the the hardback can pay at the paperback the echo Michals but it was very exciting to have the possibility of people you know putting in different order and and and you know using the rhythm of one phrase and repeating it and repeating it like a drum which kind of changes the meaning of certain bits around it I think well that's terribly exciting it's a bit like digging up a garden or something except the original garden will always exist so I was thrilled by it I want to ask Ayub friar a question can we get it can we get a microphone to this nice lady in in the middle here again just that yeah are you friar in there vez you could find no to be fine well I didn't have any questions I know but I've got a question for you okay and what why did you want to respond to the new FRA idea oh well I'm I like Steven so much and this is a good stuff yeah that's why yeah well it was very much fun to make and because it's a good practice to use Photoshop and and I like you so that's why boom thank you that's very nice can I tell you that the lady flew from Finland yesterday and is flying back because of you oh my goodness are you johanna animator hey fantastic unless thank you very much it's lovely to see you again thank you thank you very much well we got a swim meet right sorry that guy not another question oh no it's a little different oh yeah the Finnish you've got the microphone now I'm not going to give it up now anyway I go graduations on your own you're decent wedding I was just thinking whether you will be starting a family yeah well now that's peeping into volume 2 volume 1 the marriage is still still you know well I hope it'll never close but yeah volume 2 the little family that the patter of tiny feet I just come back to me on that one that was a good question yeah this gentleman over here hello I would never forgive myself if I won't ask anything so I recently read about your journey through the America on your cab so are you going to do anything else I mean something similar in some other big country like I don't know Russia I would love to judge in Russia I am doing it I'm in the middle of doing another series of as you said America was going around in a cab and this is going around Central America all the countries of Central America there are eight you will now all recite to me the eight countries of Central America no definitely I can tell you what they are I wouldn't have been able to recite them all exactly either missed one out or got one wrong but anyway Mexico although that is technically North America and we filmed in Mexico before Christmas and I'm driving a school bus one of those big yellow American school buses it's not as random as it sounds because it's American and we're in Mexico and other countries II doubt very very common as a sight throughout Central America they're known as chicken buses because you often see on them you know chickens running around and goats tethered to the seat and la ladies in in black and and they are a common way of getting around so they seemed a good idea so we're driving that and as of late next month we start in Belize and the countries are in order sort of going that way down to the border with Colombia which is obviously South America we are Mexico and then Belize Guatemala El Salvador Honduras Nicaragua Costa Rica and Panama and we finish in Panama and we weren't allowed I wasn't allowed to use any social media of any kind by the underwriters the insurance people big nor we allowed to drive at night kidnapping well really big issue there Honduras is the murder capital of the world old so that's going to be exciting Guatemala City is I think the third most dangerous city on earth so nothing it's not the most dangerous or even the second most Costa Rica on the other hand is the happiest country on earth according to the United Nations has no army it's a blissful place and yet it borders places that are very very dangerous its most off but they all you know have incredible culture food history I mean gay obviously Belize and Mexico have the Mayan civilizations the Aztec civilizations many many others who left incredible records and and they have phenomenal food drink music culture it's very exciting so that's that's what I'm doing do you do speak Spanish I can get by see yeah yeah how about that really you do right and not this gentleman here I think well microphones coming along too you'll be lucky forget pass the fins to be honest but thank you Steven you've achieved and created a lot yourself I was running do you feel that people learn got yourself people like you have a role to inspire others in new areas or not new areas it's interesting question on the one hand I wouldn't want to be so cocky as to assume that one has anything to teach people on on the other yes I know I it saddens me to think that not everyone is kind of encouraged to to believe in their own creativity or that the the contribution you know which is endless that humans can make I I've often thought that computers can provide a fantastic opportunity to educate not in the way we have it but through developments in AI and artificial intelligence and and the model I've set up in my head is of a smart computer not an expert system to use AI language but but but but but a imagine for example as a student who's going to be tested and this test is the equivalent of what we might call an a-level or a degree exam or anything in between or anything earlier these are things that really mark people out for life sometimes they're incredibly important and can destroy people's futures they get it wrong and a lot of us believe I think that exams seem to be designed to show what people don't know to humiliate them to leave you know and it's that's not what an exam should be and I think so imagine a computer that you can go up to and the computer comes up with an almost random word let's say the word is coffee now you can once you're confident about the way these things work is let's suppose you're interested in 17th century history you can talk about coffee shops the first coffee shops charge the second close them down right right around here up in Covent Garden places like that because they were as he saw it places for sedition and politics so you could talk about coffee shops and coffee as a in that sense or if you're a scientist you could talk about the emulsification and the me know the making of the drink and how it's done if you're interested in geopolitics you can talk about monocultures and crops and so on and the fair trade or lack of it and you can talk about the imperial history of coffee if you're a publisher you can talk about coffee table books what they stand for what they mean you can talk about the rise of the Starbucks you know you just you can all of you can think on the top of your heads and basically that means you go to the computer and you show off everything you know about coffee and you avoid the say the scientific stuff if you're not very scientific about it and you go right into the social side of it if you want to talk about baristas and and the phenomenon of you know a lotta coffee in the modern age as opposed to frothing coffee in the 1950s with the bars in Soho and so on so that would allow people to show so much of what they knew and what they were enthusiastic about and if they didn't like coffee they could just press a button another word good and and another word come up would come up it could be polo and they could talk about the mint they could talk about the game you know they could talk about the Volkswagen car it's just it they would and the the computer wouldn't know enough to be able to say wow it has cleaned out my memories it's you know this person has just ticked every box as far as this area is concerned and will be able to to encourage troubles you can't get an individual teacher to be able to do all that so I think that would be a marvelous thing and I'm sure won't be that far away anybody's in any doubt Stephens next book is going to be about coffee we've got time maybe but we'll take these two questions then we aren't afraid we ought to rap and so these two gentlemen at the front hi yes expanding on what you've just said regarding the computer that's based on the data rather than based on documents which is also what Tim berners-lee's called show Semantic Web yeah my partner if Kenya when she was developing the map fire project Lee in response to your invitation we talked a lot about it and and one of the things that is driving her is the idea of being able to go to this game and being able to find out everything there is that you could possibly know about coffee in which case it would fit into this idea of both basically of the Semantic Web and she we discussed a lengthier idea of artificial intelligence within computers which is presumably what Tim berners-lee would like to see happening with web 3.0 but she talked My partner is discussing the idea that artificial intelligence it could be prevent us with a big danger is that something that you have also considered well and it is something that has been spoken about a lot isn't it I believe Stephen Hawking had spoken about it and um and he has every right that's not mocking him that's just go I think he I do know Stephen Hawking and he likes it when I do that that's what just thought I should tell you that in case you thought that was making fun of him yeah of course there are dangers I sort of started following AI in the days of Marvin Minsky who's considered the father of artificial intelligence and he said some some very wise things about it and you know things have been set down people are already talking about you know having a Constitution for robots and and you know the prime directives of Robotics have been established for 40 or 50 years I think heaven they in terms of you know how deeply you can allow you know how you have to program a robot not to do certain things there's never ever harm a human for example that's deep in their programming but how can we be sure that can't be somehow circumvented it's very hard to say but with such a long way away from all that which doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about it quite the reverse I the thing that most inspired me about the early days of artificial intelligence was was it was a simple and obvious point and maybe one that would inspire you and if your programmers or if you're interested in developing things in any way as in engineers even of course as he said there's a there's a mistake we make which is we call engineering solutions elegant and we call them economical we think that's a marvelous you know compliment so we look at a tripod look at that it's perfect no it isn't you break one leg it falls over go to nature which has had millions of years to refine its engineering you can break a dog's leg it's a cruel and horrible thing to do but you know it can become broken it still walks late - as long as they're not you know it can still hop amazingly you can pull feathers out of a bird until you think you're going mad and it will still fly you can break its wing and it can still fly the point is there's a lot of inbuilt redundancy there's a there's a lot you can do because and this is the point he made for AI what what they all depend on our agencies bundles bundles of function so a wing is a bundle of feathers it's a bundle of things a leg is a bundle of ligaments and and so on and so they're very hard to destroy entirely whereas you know you go to a computer program and you turn 1-0 into a 1 or 1 1 into a 0 and the whole thing just falls over and it's the same with a lot of things that human beings design they just fall over if you if you kick them whereas if you try and imagine and computing powers allowing us now to do this to grow things to let them evolve to take the lesson from nature it's always the way that's going to work because the system that nature is if you want to call it that is one that has just tried and tried and tried over hundreds and hundreds of millions of years and we don't have hundreds and hundreds of millions of years but we do have petaflops of of processing power with which to be able to try and mimic in small ways which is exciting I think okay that last motion just here hello Steven I'm just a quick question going back to the kind of thing about I know recently you've spoken about freedom of speech and etc etcetera with the your Freud project being about limitless imagination almost and would you say there's something you're particularly interested in within the next few years or within the near future that you would really like to see within an area of freedom of expression freedom of speech what's at the Knitting point I would be thrilled if people who come from cultures and societies in which freedom of speech is difficult were to try and involve themselves in something like this which wouldn't be seen as a direct threat that could get them in into trouble wouldn't get them whipped in the town square wouldn't get them imprisoned for expressing themselves but would allow them to have full creative rein on things from from from their country that's obviously important I mean it's I've been thinking a lot about this whole freedom speech thing because people I think get a bit can well not confused but there are there are differing views with the Charlie Hebdo I set my stand out and said you know that people should be free to offend and I believe that and and people tweeted me and said well I suppose we offended you know homosexuals is it well fine you can write an offensive piece about homosexual as far as I'm concerned and I would have permission to write an offensive piece about you as a result call you a idiot that's how it goes how it worked that's fine but I also wrote a piece for Holocaust Memorial Day which is tomorrow I think in which I talked about having met this extraordinary woman Anita Laska valpha she was a survivor from Auschwitz who was a cellist and she played under the battle of Alma Rosa who was Marla's niece and incredible woman very tough very extraordinary and we talked a lot and and the thing I sort of came away with which is something I've thought about before is for the Holocaust to have happened and it's the same in in Rwanda as the radio station there the der Killeen radio station which for weeks broadcasts you know that tutors web were cockroaches kill the cockroaches they're cockroaches no human except a psychopath can kill another human without some sense of remorse and there aren't enough psychopaths in any given population to destroy another through genocide so you have to do something to recruit the ordinary members of that population and what you do is you dehumanize those that you wish to kill and Stryker and gerbils for a very long period in time described and showed as it were that the Jews were lice and rats and vermin they were not human they were some human and if you grow up you know fear of five six seven years eight years maybe nine ten years even of that because it was 43 that it started to be put in train and 44 and 45 that the the Holocaust truly exploded in terms of the death camps so there were people who had probably 12 years of indoctrination that Jews were not human and so they could do things to them that really still absolutely chill the blood and so in order to guard against another Holocaust we have to watch language we have to watch those who use language and those who speak in such a ways to dehumanize other people and that may sound if I express it wrong is if I'm I'm recommending some sort of politically correct speech in which you're not allowed to do this and allowed to be that but what I'm recommending is more or less what we have which is that you you just don't allow people to incite hatred or to to to kill don't you don't allow someone to say kill the cockroaches but that's not the same as banning people who draw cartoons or who mock so it's a very delicate business and and and delicate nuances of this kind and not easily followed especially when we have the world of digital media around where people are gonna you know possibly play with what they think may be legal which may turn out these to be very destructive and harmful to any given group of people including Islamic people of course and it's not just about protecting Jews because I happen to be Jewish obviously I have that memory from the family but if it should teach one anything it's that it applies to us all okay well I I feel that we've read just warming up but I'm afraid that is the the end of the session we end on a little bit long because I think we started a little bit late but I hope you will agree with me that was a fabulously interesting insightful and entertaining hour with mr. Frye and please could you show him your bachajón by becoming running

Channel: Anne Mavity

Views: 76,747

Rating: 4.8085108 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen Fry, YourFry, Will Gompertz, The Fry Chronicles, stephen fry interview, stephen fry documentary, stephen fry language, stephen fry on language, stephen fry podcast, stephen fry stand up, stephen fry on god, stephen fry funny interview

Id: BUCyiXOrSbQ

Length: 57min 16sec (3436 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 30 2015