{"id":668297,"date":"2026-10-28T23:44:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T23:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/668297\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T23:44:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T23:44:14","slug":"the-future-with-hannah-fry-on-bbc-two-just-as-humans-stuck-gorillas-in-zoos-could-ai-do-the-same-to-us-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/668297\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future with Hannah Fry on BBC Two: Just as humans stuck gorillas in zoos, could AI do the same to us? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Fry<\/a> was hopeless on Celebrity Traitors, where all of her scientific discipline and boffin\u2019s aura evaporated the moment she was made a Traitor and had to go around back-stabbing her fellow A-listers. But she is on firmer ground with the agreeably informative yet informal second series of The Future with Hannah Fry (BBC Two, 7.30pm), where she ditches her Traitor\u2019s cape and once again tackles the big science issues of the day.<\/p>\n

These subjects include the suddenly quite-terrifying issue of AI<\/a>. In the previous season, she investigated the chilling subject of chatbots, and had a very weird encounter with a man who had constructed an AI bot based on a dead parent, so that he could continue to converse with them from beyond the grave.<\/p>\n

That was Black Mirror with rocket jets attached \u2013 and it had the usually level-headed Fry in tears of shock and mild horror. That said, talking to weird personalities who only vaguely approximate real human beings was the perfect preparation for Celebrity Traitors and, to that extent, the experience presumably stood to her.<\/p>\n

The going is comparatively cheerier as this latest run of episodes begins with a deep dive into the subject of machine learning. Fry begins her adventure by gazing at some gorillas in a zoo in London. Humans and gorillas share a distant ancestor \u2013 yet humans have gone on to enthusiastically bung their fellow apes into enclosures and destroy their natural habitats.<\/p>\n

The obvious worry, she notes, is that AI could do the same with us. Gorillas have only a vague awareness that the world they live in is designed by and for humans. Might AI wreak similar havoc \u2013 with our puny-ish brains unable to process what\u2019s happening?<\/p>\n

[\u00a0AI: are we building a partner, or a Frankenstein\u2019s monster?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Fry hasn\u2019t quite made up her mind, and reminds the viewer that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT<\/a> and Elon Musk<\/a>\u2019s beloved Grok<\/a> aren\u2019t thinking machines as we might imagine them, but vast spreadsheets. She delves into the deeply unsettling possibility that, to become fully intelligent, as we think of the word, machines would have to exist fully in three dimensions \u2013 ie, acquire some kind of a robot-type \u201cbody\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cChatGPT can guess what gravity is \u2013 based on people\u2019s descriptions of it. It\u2019s a reflection of a reflection. Whereas, if you actually experience it, you get it right from the source,\u201d explains Sergey Levine, an associate professor at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

Concerns over the possible impact of AI on humanity have been given short shrift by the tech industry \u2013 and that may come back to haunt us, says UC Berkeley\u2019s Prof Stuart Russell. \u201cIf you make machines that are more intelligent than we are, it\u2019s not going to be easy to retain power over them forever,\u201d he says. \u201cWe could just decide not to do it. But the economic incentives are too great. The amount being invested right now, specifically to create superintelligent AI, is in the ballpark of what the entire world spends on basic science research.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Is artificial intelligence the greatest threat to humankind?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Fry also explores the issue of racial bias in AI. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen problems with facial recognition software. It makes more mistakes with people who have darkened skin colour,\u201d says Melanie Mitchell, the James B Alley jnr professor at the Santa Fe Institute in California.<\/p>\n

Fry reminds us that the human brain is many times more sophisticated than the average chatbot \u2013 and that it is by no means a given that we will end up locked away, being gawped at by the machines. \u201cWhile the gorilla problem is a poignant warning for the future \u2013 we should not be distracted from today\u2019s risks, like racial bias and fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is hardly an optimistic conclusion. But Fry nonetheless makes an important point about the threat posed by AI not being some dystopian nightmare but one rooted in the same old prejudices that have afflicted humanity for centuries. Just like the poor old gorilla in the zoo, we can\u2019t escape from who and what we really are. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hannah Fry was hopeless on Celebrity Traitors, where all of her scientific discipline and boffin\u2019s aura evaporated the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,2670,4069,62259,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-668297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-grok","tag-hannah-fry","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}