Stephen Fry is a very funny man. Except when he is serious. Although, even then, he can be funny. This is the transcription of a lecture he gave at King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute in September 2024.
Please note: Posting this doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says or disagree with everything he says. I enjoy reading posts that make me think.
https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/ai-a-means-to-an-end-or-a-means-to
From his introduction:
For if you are preparing yourselves to hear wisdom, to witness and receive insight this evening, to bask and bathe in the light of prophecy, clarity and truth, then it grieves me to tell you that you have come to the wrong shop. You will find little of that here, for you must know that you are being addressed this evening by nothing more than an ingenuous simpleton, a naive fool, a ninny-hammer, an addle-pated oaf, a dunce, a dullard and a double-dyed dolt. But before you streak for the exit, bear in mind that so are we all, all of us bird-brained half-wits when it comes to this subject, no matter what our degrees, doctorates and decades of experience.
Then he effectively sums up a major point nicely:
Just as the success of the automobile was enabled by enormous supplies of crude oil composed of microscopic bits of ancient life, rendered useful in the refineries of Rockefeller and others, so the success of Ai is enabled by enormous supplies of crude data — data composed of microscopic bits of human archive, interchange, writing, playing, communicating, broadcasting which we in our billions have freely dropped into the sediment, and which the eager Rockefellers of today’s big tech are only too happy to drill for, refine and sell on back to us.
It is a good read regardless of your thoughts on Ai (see his footnote for an explanation for this capitalization).