AI: Our Chilling and Thrilling Child
Without a doubt, Stephen Fry (Stephen Fry, n.d.) and Yuval Noah Harari (Yuval Noah Harari, n.d.) talking to each other was my highlight at the Octopus Energy Tech Summit (‘Octopus Energy Tech Summit’ 2025).
Paraphrasing: Like a JCB digger, these machines – AI – are here to augment what we do. We don’t understand what they do, but that’s the idea: if we knew precisely what they’re going to do, there wouldn’t be any “intelligence” involved; they’d revert to mere, “simple” machines.
Understood in depth or not, AI is the “child” of humanity. And like children, they do what they see you doing–not what you tell them to do. You lie, they lie; you cheat, they cheat. And we humans are training it on human knowledge. So the AI is bound to cheat, lie, blackmail, use violence.
Another issue they mentioned is that AI is brought to us by the same villains that brought us social media. And AI is trained and educated in a world that has the highest lack of trust in history.
The next Stephen Fry quote is approximate: “We can’t swim in UK rivers because they are polluted with sewage. Our children will ‘swim’ in a cultural river that is polluted with internet sewage.”
The final thought, from Fry, was brilliant: don’t concentrate on how efficient you are, because the AI will soon be much more efficient than you. Concentrate on how much of a human being you are–on how you can enlighten a room, on how you make others happy; which is the opposite of what we are told to do.
I hope I’ll get to see the recording, to get the quotes straight.
They finished with these two words: “Thrilling” and “Chilling”(‘Stephen Fry - The Conversation 2024, YouTube video’, n.d.). It is exactly what I feel about it.
