What Prometheus WARNS Us About Artificial Intelligence 🤖 Stephen Fry

but now this moment as I'm talking to you we are faced with exactly the the same quandry that Zeus and Prometheus faced we have made entities that are sort of like the first man before we it had fire Jolly clever and sweet and they can obey us and do our bidding just as first man did but some of us as youus and said we must not give them Consciousness we must not give them the Divine spark or they won't need us anymore and we will be sidelined and possibly even totally destroyed and made extinct and

others the prometheus's in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are saying oh no give it to them it' be so exciting it'd be so exciting Now isn't that extraordinary a story that is thousands of years old that seems so irrelevant in some ways and about the creation of mankind it contains a kernel of truth that is achieved by different people swapping ideas about why we are different what is it we've got radio of constant and it's a worry with AI as you know is is I don't know if people have tried it I almost don't want to

tell them it's possible I'm sure most people know but you can go to your chat GPT or whichever is your AI of choice on your computer and say I want to write a screenplay um I want it to be about a spy who is probably on his last uppers and is bit alcoholic and he gets his last chance you know whatever cliche you come out with so but I want it to be a fresh story and I want to be a lot of betrayal um can you can you rough it out for me and the

AI will instantly provide a story for you and then you go well go drill a bit deeper please I want the first actor to you know and and it will start doing it for you and it's deeply will write for an interview it will write questions so you could put into chat gbt and other various forms of that particular genre platform you can put into that you can input um 10 can you please come up with 10 questions that Chris Evans might ask Steven fry good Lord yeah so they can do it the thing is

though they say you know every invention every sort of New Pasture there's always a technology behind it so one could say because everybody's talking about AI course they are you know one could say that was the was the fountain pen the right thing to do after the quill because it it accelerates the process too much if you're around at the time I'm sure that was an exponential kind of Leap Forward is it not just our version of that of course it's it's it's um it's it's more hyperbolized it's it's more threatening we're more connected and

disconnected than of Technology all but I think it's also important to Look Backwards what um talking that young phrase the collective unconscious this this whoever it was who invented these stories uh in Greek myth I'll give you an example which relates to AI um directly of of how uh stories that are told by the communal mind of people trying to understand who we are because that's the the most extraordinary question none of us asked to be born and here we are and we have this strange living thing inside our brain our Consciousness our sense of

who we are what it's like to be ourselves our our stess and our Christ and our vastness that is unlike anything else and it drives us and it drives us sometimes to do terrible things and it drives us to to yearn and to want and to decide and all these things and and and naturally the first thing we did when we had language which is only you know 8,000 years ago maximum uh uh is uh is ask us why we we're different from animals why are we different um and so in the Greek myth Prometheus

makes us makes us human beings and Zeus breathes into us and his daughter Athena breathes her wisdom into us and and and Zeus is delighted they can worship us and they can play with us and they can be fun and and Prometheus says yes and I'll teach them how to make you know pots and and and metal and goes whoa whoa whoa W no so you can do anything these people but don't give them fire never give them fire and pus says why not he said well you've given them fire and by fire we mean

both literal fire that allows the technology for melting and smelting and roasting and toasting um but but but also also the Divine fire the Divine fire that is that Consciousness that I was talking about that awareness that creative spark that fire well Prometheus disobeys him and he takes fire from heaven and he gives it to Mankind and Zeus looks down and sees these lights going off and this fire and he is furious cuz he thinks this this is the end for us one day they won't need us one day we will be replaced because they

can now they can now do everything they can create they have the Divine fire and so he punishes Prometheus terribly chains him to the mountains he has his liver pecked out every day by a vulture or an eagle uh and he grows back overnight because he's Immortal anyway all of that was you know people then this was replaced by the Garden of Eden and other creation myths in most of our culture but by the 50 16th century we started to lose a little bit of the Stranglehold of the ecclesiastical power of the of of of

the the hierarchies of the church and so on uh partly through printing in 1450 you know the first printing coming out and and and then we this was followed by what we call the Age of Reason Newton and Galileo and so on starting to ask questions they hadn't been allowed to be asked and then the Enlightenment and Romanticism and and the beginning of Romanticism as suddenly Prometheus was our was our new Christ because he was the creator who didn't um um sacrifice himself for us in the way that Christ did for sin but because the

gods were angry with us and the gods were jealous and this gave humanism this great impetus this spark of self-confidence to be a human and we don't have to apologize to God all the time for the crime of having been born and and within a very short space of time Beethoven wrote the creatures of Prometheus one of his finest pieces of music Shel wrote Prometheus Unbound and more importantly Shell's wife Mary shell wrote Frankenstein whose subtitle is a modern Prometheus about the creation and then you think okay well that's interesting but now this moment as

I'm talking to you we are faced with exactly the the same quandry that Zeus and Prometheus faced we have made entities that are sort of like the first man before we it had fire clever and sweet and they can obey us and do our bidding just as first man did but some of us as Zeus and so we must not give them Consciousness we must not give them the Divine spark or they won't need us anymore and we will be sidelined and possibly even totally destroyed and made extinct and others the Prometheus is in Silicon

Valley and elsewhere are saying oh no give it to them it' be so exciting it'd be so exciting Now isn't that extraordinary a story that is thousands of years old that seems so irrelevant in some ways about the creation of mankind it contains a kernel of truth that is achieved by different people swapping ideas about why we are different what is it we've got it's something that other because they can look at other animals they mate they excrete they eat just like us but they don't do the things we do they don't build cities they

don't write music they don't you know there just so where did we get it from it's a spark we've got a thing that others don't and that thing which is such a puzzle they call it the hard problem of Consciousness in philosophy don't they um that thing maybe a machine will get it we we don't know how we got it CU we are machines we just Haven to be biological ones but we still follow the laws of cause and effect and electricity and chemistry and everything else right as a simpleton one zooms out and isn't

this just rinse and repeat wasn't it always going to end up this way yes exactly and it may have happened many many times it reminds me of the Douglas Adam thing about you know when someone understands the infinite complexity Madness eccentricity weirdness of the universe when someone suddenly understands it it will instantly disappear and be replaced by an even weirder and more eccentric one and the other theory is that this has already happened which I think is very Douglas Adams but yes that that's right rinse and repeat as you sayadi e