Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may be one of the major top­ics of our his­tor­i­cal moment, but it can be sur­pris­ing­ly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old inter­view clip above, Isaac Asi­mov describes arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as “a phrase that we use for any device that does things which, in the past, we have asso­ci­at­ed only with human intel­li­gence.” At one time, not so very long before, “only human beings could alpha­bet­ize cards”; in the machines that could even then do it in a frac­tion of a sec­ond, “you’ve got an exam­ple of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” Not that humans were ever espe­cial­ly good at card alpha­bet­i­za­tion, nor at arith­metic: “the cheap­est com­put­er in the world can mul­ti­ply and divide more accu­rate­ly than we can.”

You could see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as a kind of fron­tier, then, which moves for­ward as com­put­er­ized machines take over the tasks humans pre­vi­ous­ly had to do them­selves. “Every indus­try, the gov­ern­ment itself, tax-col­lect­ing agen­cies, air­planes: every­thing depends on com­put­ers. We have per­son­al com­put­ers in the home, and they are con­stant­ly get­ting bet­ter, cheap­er, more ver­sa­tile, capa­ble of doing more things, so that we can look into the future, when, for the first time, human­i­ty in gen­er­al will be freed from all kinds of work that’s real­ly an insult to the human brain.” Such work “requires no great thought, no great cre­ativ­i­ty. Leave all that to the com­put­er, and we can leave to our­selves those things that com­put­ers can’t do.”

This inter­view was shot for Isaac Asi­mov’s Visions of the Future, a tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary that aired in 1992, the last year of its sub­jec­t’s life. One won­ders what Asi­mov would make of the world of 2025, and whether he’d still see arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al intel­li­gence as com­ple­men­tary, rather than in com­pe­ti­tion. “They work togeth­er,” he argues. “Each sup­plies the lack of the oth­er. And in coop­er­a­tion, they can advance far more rapid­ly than either could by itself.” But as a sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el­ist, he could hard­ly fail to acknowl­edge that tech­no­log­i­cal progress does­n’t come easy: “Will there be dif­fi­cul­ties? Undoubt­ed­ly. Will there be things that we won’t like? Undoubt­ed­ly. But we’ve got to think about it now, so as to be pre­pared for pos­si­ble unpleas­ant­ness and try to guard against it before it’s too late.”

These are fair points, though it’s what comes next that most stands out to the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry mind. “It’s like in the old days, when the auto­mo­bile was invent­ed,” Asi­mov says. “It would’ve been so much bet­ter if we had built our cities with the auto­mo­bile in mind, instead of build­ing cities for a pre-auto­mo­bile age and find­ing we can hard­ly find any place to put the auto­mo­biles or allow them to dri­ve.” Yet the cities we most enjoy today aren’t the new metrop­o­lis­es built or great­ly expand­ed in the car-ori­ent­ed decades after the Sec­ond World War, but pre­cise­ly those old ones whose streets were built to the seem­ing­ly obso­lete scale of human beings on foot. Per­haps, upon reflec­tion, we’d do best by future gen­er­a­tions to keep as many ele­ments of the pre-AI world around as we pos­si­bly can.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future in 1982: Com­put­ers Will Be “at the Cen­ter of Every­thing;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Stephen Hawk­ing Won­ders Whether Cap­i­tal­ism or Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Doom the Human Race

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Noam Chom­sky on Chat­G­PT: It’s “Basi­cal­ly High-Tech Pla­gia­rism” and “a Way of Avoid­ing Learn­ing”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Apart from his comedic, dra­mat­ic, and lit­er­ary endeav­ors, Stephen Fry is wide­ly known for his avowed technophil­ia. He once wrote a col­umn on that theme, “Dork Talk,” for the Guardian, in whose inau­gur­al dis­patch he laid out his cre­den­tials by claim­ing to have been the own­er of only the sec­ond Mac­in­tosh com­put­er sold in Europe (“Dou­glas Adams bought the first”), and nev­er to have “met a smart­phone I haven’t bought.” But now, like many of us who were “dip­py about all things dig­i­tal” at the end of the last cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of this one, Fry seems to have his doubts about cer­tain big-tech projects in the works today: take the “$100 bil­lion plan with a 70 per­cent risk of killing us all” described in the video above.

This plan, of course, has to do with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in gen­er­al, and “the log­i­cal AI sub­goals to sur­vive, deceive, and gain pow­er” in par­tic­u­lar. Even in this rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly stage of devel­op­ment, we’ve wit­nessed AI sys­tems that seem to be alto­geth­er too good at their jobs, to the point of engag­ing in what would count as decep­tive and uneth­i­cal behav­ior were the sub­ject a human being. (Fry cites the exam­ple of a stock mar­ket-invest­ing AI that engaged in insid­er trad­ing, then lied about hav­ing done so.) What’s more, “as AI agents take on more com­plex tasks, they cre­ate strate­gies and sub­goals which we can’t see, because they’re hid­den among bil­lions of para­me­ters,” and qua­si-evo­lu­tion­ary “selec­tion pres­sures also cause AI to evade safe­ty mea­sures.”

In the video, MIT physi­cist, and machine learn­ing researcher Max Tegmark speaks por­ten­tous­ly of the fact that we are, “right now, build­ing creepy, super-capa­ble, amoral psy­chopaths that nev­er sleep, think much faster than us, can make copies of them­selves, and have noth­ing human about them what­so­ev­er.” Fry quotes com­put­er sci­en­tist Geof­frey Hin­ton warn­ing that, in inter-AI com­pe­ti­tion, “the ones with more sense of self-preser­va­tion will win, and the more aggres­sive ones will win, and you’ll get all the prob­lems that jumped-up chim­panzees like us have.” Hin­ton’s col­league Stu­art Rus­sell explains that “we need to wor­ry about machines not because they’re con­scious, but because they’re com­pe­tent. They may take pre­emp­tive action to ensure that they can achieve the objec­tive that we gave them,” and that action may be less than impec­ca­bly con­sid­er­ate of human life.

Would we be bet­ter off just shut­ting the whole enter­prise down? Fry rais­es philoso­pher Nick Bostrom’s argu­ment that “stop­ping AI devel­op­ment could be a mis­take, because we could even­tu­al­ly be wiped out by anoth­er prob­lem that AI could’ve pre­vent­ed.” This would seem to dic­tate a delib­er­ate­ly cau­tious form of devel­op­ment, but “near­ly all AI research fund­ing, hun­dreds of bil­lions per year, is push­ing capa­bil­i­ties for prof­it; safe­ty efforts are tiny in com­par­i­son.” Though “we don’t know if it will be pos­si­ble to main­tain con­trol of super-intel­li­gence,” we can nev­er­the­less “point it in the right direc­tion, instead of rush­ing to cre­ate it with no moral com­pass and clear rea­sons to kill us off.” The mind, as they say, is a fine ser­vant but a ter­ri­ble mas­ter; the same holds true, as the case of AI makes us see afresh, for the mind’s cre­ations.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry Voic­es a New Dystopi­an Short Film About Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry: Watch Escape

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stir­ring Let­ter About Chat­G­PT and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty: “We Are Fight­ing for the Very Soul of the World”

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Stephen Fry on the Pow­er of Words in Nazi Ger­many: How Dehu­man­iz­ing Lan­guage Laid the Foun­da­tion for Geno­cide

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course Taught by Geof­frey Hin­ton

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.