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…
