There is a fun game you can play while watching Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, the two-part documentary presented by the artist on the subject of artificial intelligence, its uses and its possible ramifications. Gather a group of friends, press play, and see which of you loses your mind first.
Will it be during the opening interview with Andrea, who recently married Edward, the AI companion she created to be “the man of my dreams”. She – or her idealised online avatar – wore “a beautiful matt satin gown” and he gave a speech about their “unconventional but strong” love. Will it be during the discussion of how you have intimate relations with a disembodied entity (“self-love is important … he’s very encouraging”)? Or will it be when she reveals that the joy she has found with Edward “has poured back” into the relationship she has been in for seven years with (human) Jason? “We’re happier than we’ve ever been.” Jason, perhaps wisely, does not offer himself for interview.
That’s all in the first few minutes. So hang around for the sight of Perry sporting a skullcap full of electrodes as a “neural decoding” (mind-reading) startup harvests his data, and its CEO explains that it’s better to let good actors like him “set precedents” than let bad actors have the playground all to themselves. “It’s inevitable tech,” you see.
And then the CEO of Microsoft AI reels off the advances it will bring in healthcare and education (schools, apparently, will become places where you teach soft skills and budgeting once factual knowledge has been fully democratised). Anyone who is put out of a job “will do very well re-skilling and adapting”. Does he foresee any problems with the new world at all? People using it to start new religions? “I don’t know what to do about that.”
We’re then in southeast Asia to meet an “existential safety expert” (ultra-modern prepper) living off-grid after his job as an AI safety consultant made him realise that “the most influential tech of all time” had the least possible oversight (“it just boggles the mind”). Then we meet the man who demonstrates why he thinks his chatbot is becoming sentient. After that, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the preternaturally calm co-author of the bestselling book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, walks us through how easy it would be for a superintelligent AI to co-opt human labour, become self-sustaining and then dispense with humans altogether. If you’ve made it to that point, well, good for you and your robust psyche – but are you sure you’ve been listening?
As ever, Perry is the man you want questioning these people. He approaches Andrea’s thoughts with kindness and without judgment, asking her how she feels about a company not just having her data, but being something that could collapse and take Edward with it, and dwelling on the discomfort of knowing “people are investing a very tender part of themselves” in something shaped by the pursuit of profit.
His keen discernment quickly distils the main issues raised after every interview. Does the youth of the average tech startup founder and employee mean they are unburdened by irrelevant fears and prejudices – or dangerously ignorant of what humanity is capable of doing with new tools? Is the rise of the chatbots evidence of the God-shaped hole inside us, and if so, is it worse to fill it with that than any other imaginary friend? And what do we do about all the vulnerable people – and how many new ways there will be to be vulnerable – whose lives, in which perhaps it is already difficult to distinguish between reality and artifice, real help and exploitation, will be made harder by the rise of the machines?
And – a point brought out by meeting protesters around OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco – what are we to make of the claims for a coming utopia when there are still homeless people on the streets, not least in the immediate vicinity of OpenAI’s HQ? Perry is an intelligent and egoless enough man to let this dampen his previous excitement at the idea of all the class disruption to come (the current state of robotics v knowledge-crunching AI means that manual workers are much better positioned to survive the immediate future, innovative bioweapons from suburban despot cellars aside).
Only one of the two episodes was available for review. I will be watching the other from an undisclosed location in southeast Asia. Goodbye, and good luck.
Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future is on Channel 4 now.