Hannah Fry Explores AI Risks in The Future on BBC Two

Hannah Fry is returning to BBC Two with a second series of The Future with Hannah Fry, where she examines whether humanity is inadvertently building its own digital cage. Fry posits that just as humans have historically confined gorillas to zoos, AI could eventually do the same to us, leaving humans as subjects in an environment designed by a superior intellect we cannot fully comprehend.

Fry Uses Gorillas as Metaphor for Human Limitation

The series opens with Fry observing gorillas in a London zoo, using the primate’s limited awareness of its human-designed enclosure as a metaphor for the potential future of the human race. The core anxiety is that our “puny-ish brains” may be unable to process what’s happening.

The gap between a predictive text model and a sentient entity is the gap between a reflection and the source.

Intelligence May Require a Physical Presence

A central tension in the series is the debate over whether true intelligence requires a physical presence. According to Sergey Levine, an associate professor at UC Berkeley, there is a fundamental difference between knowing a fact and experiencing a phenomenon.

“ChatGPT can guess what gravity is – based on people’s descriptions of it. It’s a reflection of a reflection. Whereas, if you actually experience it, you get it right from the source,” Levine explains.

This suggests that for AI to become fully intelligent, as we think of the word, it would need to exist in three dimensions—essentially requiring a robot-type “body” to interact with the physical world.

Financial Momentum Pushes Toward Superintelligence

While the technical hurdles are significant, the financial momentum pushing toward superintelligence is staggering. Prof Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley warns that the tech industry has given short shrift to concerns over the possible impact of AI on humanity, including the risk of losing control over machines that are more intelligent than we are.

Russell notes that the current investment in superintelligent AI is in the ballpark of what the entire world spends on basic science research.

Racial Bias and the Immediate Threat

While the “zoo scenario” serves as a poignant long-term warning, Fry argues that we cannot let futuristic nightmares distract us from today’s risks. The most pressing danger isn’t a robot uprising, but the codification of human prejudice into software.

Melanie Mitchell, the James B Alley jnr professor at the Santa Fe Institute in California, points to the failure of facial recognition software as a primary example, noting that these systems make more mistakes with people who have darkened skin colour. This suggests that AI isn’t creating new problems so much as it is amplifying ancient human biases at scale.

From Celebrity Traitors to Scientific Truths

The return to science marks a shift in public persona for Fry, who recently appeared on Celebrity Traitors. It was observed that while her scientific discipline evaporated during the social manipulation of that reality show, she is on firmer ground in The Future. Interestingly, her previous season’s exploration of chatbots—including an AI bot based on a dead parent—served as a bridge between the two worlds, exposing her to “weird personalities” that only vaguely approximated human beings.

Ultimately, the series suggests that the threat of AI is not a sudden, alien invasion of the mind, but a mirror. Whether it is the racial bias in a facial recognition algorithm or the hubris of creating a superintelligence for profit, the machines are reflecting the flaws of their creators.

Worth a look