Original subtitles

First, let's think about the dream. Let's think about

what our kind of popular culture has depicted artificial intelligence as in

the movies over time.

So it's possible you've seen some of these movies.

Does anybody recognize this?

Who's the tall yellow one?

That's C-3PO. What does C-3PO do?

C-3PO is this protocol droid, human-cyborg relations, right? He's

basically Google translate,

with anxiety, right?

Okay, how about R2-D2, what does he do?

Yeah, I, I have no idea what he does actually...

But the point is both of them, they're helpful,

they're well-meaning, they're good, right, and it's a very positive view on what technology can bring.

This was the seventies.

Things kind of got darker in our popular culture view of technology,

and this goes through a wide range of genres, not just movies and so we

started worrying. Wait a minute,

maybe the robots won't translate for us and beep around,

maybe there's gonna be killer hardware from the future coming back to kill us.

It's a very different view, right, and

you know they kinda looked the same--uh, maybe not but it's a very different view of

the future. It's very scary, right. The scary hardware coming back, really with malice.

We're now a little bit afraid of the technology.

That was the eighties. What about the nineties? In the nineties we learned that

actually, software is scary.

And then what's happened since then? Well since then you know we've thought of a lot of ideas but

really the basic fear

of what technology might do if it goes wrong

hasn't gone away.

Now we worry about things like, what if

kind of the evil technology turns on us and maybe actually we can't even tell

us apart from them.

Or, maybe the technology won't just look like us,

maybe instead the technology will be evil and

... really snarky.

And so we're not really sure what we're afraid of,

but kind of we know we're afraid. Okay, there's exceptions like WALL-E that have a

somewhat uplifting view of what technology might bring, at least after we destroy ourselves.

But, by and large there's this thread of worrying about what AI might do.

Okay, that's the science fiction story, that's the worry, right--

I'm not very worried about these things,

at present.