Artificial intelligence comes with great gifts but also great risk, noted actor Sir Stephen Fry told an audience of IT service providers (ITSPs), vendors, distributors and other tech companies during a keynote session at ChannelCon EMEA in London.
“I am both a ‘boomer’ and a ‘doomer,’” he said. “A doomer because it is in the same hands of the people who gave us social media. A doomer because they are fighting any hint or suggestion of guardrails and caution. A doomer because all technology is inevitably exploited.
“I’m a boomer too because AI itself gives us unique tools with which to deal with the very threats that I’ve mentioned. It [will] very soon help us with some of the worst diseases we’ve known. Without AI, how can we beat climate change?”
Fry later added the risk of AI and giving us access to “everything,” comparing it to Moravec’s Paradox, which notes that what humans find easy, machines find difficult, and vice versa.
“Instantaneous calculation, the filing and retrieval and sorting of data, we find very slow and extraordinarily difficult. But I can pick up a water bottle. It’s easy. But for a machine, it takes so much power to do so,” Fry said.
Humankind will need to be wise, conscientious and flexible when considering how AI will impact our lives going forward, Fry said.
“We can see the impact of [AI] with blue collar work. If only a machine could dig a canal or a whole robotic system could do it. White collar work? No. ‘I’m a team leader. That’s what I do. I’m good at team meetings and I’m bloody good at PowerPoint!’ Actually, you need to remember there’s nothing there. It’s not our ‘thing’ to do, it’s just something to learn in Office.”
Fry walked the audience through a history of progressive innovations that got us to our current digital age, from William Shockley’s development of the transistor to Gordon Moore and Intelligent Electronics (Intel)’s work on semiconductors to Alan Turing’s work on AI.
“We must understand the past to understand the future. Remember how transformative tech is and that we are a young species, only 300,000 years in our present form. We’ve been writing for only 5,000 years, even working for a living is very recent and not as inevitable as it seems. We’re moving to another phase. If change is coming, whether we want it or not, let’s decide at least whose hands we should be in.”
Fry has been a prolific tech blogger and is a voracious early adopter of technology. He was one of the first people in the UK to have a Macintosh, and later an iPhone. “I was filming at the time [when he received the iPhone] and had little signal. I had to get an AT&T account and have a sim card FedEx’d to me. It was an exciting time,” he said.
Fry has never been short of opinions on technology, history and million other subjects. “I love to communicate—though not through the medium of dance. Ever,” he joked, “Clicking people’s brains with ideas to light fires. Great standups, comedians observe things about ourselves. They do it better than politicians. They show us who we are,” he said, adding that everything he’s learned is due to an overcurious imagination.
“I cannot stop wanting to learn and read about how things came to be. It’s an insatiable curiosity. I’m grateful to it. I have a good memory to acquire stories of things and I try to make it interesting to others,” he said.
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