Stephen Fry: Do we give AI fire?
00:00:00.000 | Zeus refused to allow us to have fire.
00:00:05.000 | And the fire, I think, means both literal fire,
00:00:08.000 | to allow us to become bronze-age man,
00:00:10.000 | to create weapons and to cook meat,
00:00:13.000 | but also the internal fire of self-consciousness and creativity,
00:00:17.000 | the divine fire.
00:00:19.000 | And Zeus didn't want us to have it.
00:00:21.000 | And Prometheus stole fire from heaven, gave it to man,
00:00:25.000 | and Zeus was so angry that he punished Prometheus
00:00:28.000 | by chaining him to a mountainside.
00:00:30.000 | And the other punishment was that Zeus and the other gods created Pandora,
00:00:36.000 | the all-gifted, that is what Pandora, all-gifted,
00:00:41.000 | and sent her down as the first woman.
00:00:43.000 | She had everything.
00:00:45.000 | But he also gave her this jar.
00:00:47.000 | She was told she shouldn't look into the jar,
00:00:50.000 | but she had this curiosity and she opened the jar,
00:00:52.000 | and I'm sure you all know the story,
00:00:54.000 | out flew hardship, lies, deceit, murder, pestilence,
00:00:58.000 | all the ills of the world, and the golden age was over.
00:01:01.000 | She slammed the lid back on, and one little fairy was left inside,
00:01:05.000 | Elpis, hope.
00:01:07.000 | Now, I'm going to put that to one side,
00:01:09.000 | and I'm going to go back to 1989,
00:01:12.000 | when I became fascinated by this extraordinary new development
00:01:16.000 | in which you could network computers to a network of networks,
00:01:21.000 | which was starting to be called the Internet.
00:01:25.000 | I thought this is the biggest and most exciting bringing together
00:01:28.000 | of human beings in the history of our planet.
00:01:31.000 | It is the all-gifted.
00:01:33.000 | It will give us freedom of access to knowledge.
00:01:37.000 | We will share things, art, politics.
00:01:40.000 | Boundaries will be dissolved.
00:01:42.000 | When social media came, and the Arab Spring,
00:01:44.000 | and I thought there would be no more tribalism,
00:01:47.000 | no more hatred, no more racism.
00:01:49.000 | This would be wonderful.
00:01:51.000 | But what happened?
00:01:53.000 | The lid opened, and out came trolls, out came abusers,
00:02:00.000 | out came racists and tribalists and insulters
00:02:03.000 | and the worst kind of humanity.
00:02:05.000 | It was an exact replay of Pandora's box,
00:02:09.000 | and I thought that was so interesting that the Greeks had this understanding
00:02:13.000 | that when we have something that seems perfect,
00:02:16.000 | there is no possibility but that it also contains its opposite.
00:02:20.000 | I guarantee you, whether you like to think it or not,
00:02:23.000 | that although we know through Darwin and science and genes
00:02:29.000 | that we were not created by an intelligent designer,
00:02:34.000 | in 100 years' time, we can guarantee there will be sapient creatures,
00:02:39.000 | sapient beings on this earth that have been intelligently designed.
00:02:44.000 | You can call them robots, you can call them compounds
00:02:47.000 | of augmented biology and artificial intelligence,
00:02:51.000 | but they will exist.
00:02:53.000 | My question is this.
00:02:55.000 | When the Prometheus, who makes the first really impressive piece
00:02:59.000 | of robotic AI, like Frankenstein, but like Prometheus,
00:03:03.000 | back in the Greek myth, they will have a question.
00:03:06.000 | Do we give it fire?
00:03:08.000 | Do we give these creatures self-knowledge, self-consciousness?
00:03:13.000 | An autonomy that is greater than any other machine has ever had
00:03:18.000 | and will be similar to ours?
00:03:20.000 | In other words, shall we be Zeus and deny them fire because we're afraid of them,
00:03:25.000 | because they will destroy us?
00:03:27.000 | And the Greeks and the human beings did destroy the gods.
00:03:30.000 | They no longer needed them.
00:03:32.000 | And it is very possible we will create a race of sapient beings
00:03:37.000 | who will not need us.
00:03:39.000 | [ Silence ]
00:03:44.000 | [ Silence ]
00:03:49.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]