Singularity 1 on 1: James Barrat on Our Final Invention
For 20 years James Barrat has created documentary films for National Geographic, the BBC, Discovery Channel, History Channel and public television. In 2000, during the course of his career as a film-maker, James interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Arthur C. Clarke. The latter interview not only transformed entirely Barrat’s views on artificial intelligence, but also made him write a book on the technological singularity called Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.
I read an advance copy of Our Final Invention and it is by far the most thoroughly researched and comprehensive anti-The Singularity is Near book that I have read so far. And so I couldn’t help it but invite James on Singularity 1 on 1 so that we can discuss the reasons for his abrupt change of mind and consequent fear or the singularity.
During our 70 minute conversation with Barrat we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: his work as a documentary film-maker who takes interesting and complicated subjects and makes them simple to understand; why writing was his first love and how he got interested in the technological singularity; how his initial optimism about AI turned into pessimism; the thesis of Our Final Invention; why he sees artificial intelligence more like ballistic missiles rather than video games; why true intelligence is inherently unpredictable “black box”; how we can study AI before we can actually create it; hard vs slow take-off scenarios; the positive bias in the singularity community; our current chances of survival and what we should do…
