{"id":394166,"date":"2026-04-15T22:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/394166\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T22:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:17:08","slug":"grayson-perry-has-seen-the-future-review-some-of-these-insights-into-ai-are-just-mindblowing-television-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/394166\/","title":{"rendered":"Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future review \u2013 some of these insights into AI are just mindblowing | Television & radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a fun game you can play while watching Grayson Perry<\/a> Has Seen the Future, the three-part documentary presented by the artist on the subject of artificial intelligence, its uses and its possible ramifications. Gather a group of friends, press play, and see which of you loses your mind first.<\/p>\n

Will it be during the opening interview with Andrea, who recently married Edward, the AI companion she created to be \u201cthe man of my dreams\u201d. She \u2013 or her idealised online avatar \u2013 wore \u201ca beautiful matt satin gown\u201d and he gave a speech about their \u201cunconventional but strong\u201d love. Will it be during the discussion of how you have intimate relations with a disembodied entity (\u201cself-love is important \u2026 he\u2019s very encouraging\u201d)? Or will it be when she reveals that the joy she has found with Edward \u201chas poured back\u201d into the relationship she has been in for seven years with (human) Jason? \u201cWe\u2019re happier than we\u2019ve ever been.\u201d Jason, perhaps wisely, does not offer himself for interview.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all in the first few minutes. So hang around for the sight of Perry sporting a skullcap full of electrodes as a \u201cneural decoding\u201d (mind-reading) startup harvests his data, and its CEO explains that it\u2019s better to let good actors like him \u201cset precedents\u201d than let bad actors have the playground all to themselves. \u201cIt\u2019s inevitable tech,\u201d you see.<\/p>\n

And then the CEO of Microsoft AI reels off the advances it will bring in healthcare and education (schools, apparently, will become places where you teach soft skills and budgeting once factual knowledge has been fully democratised). Anyone who is put out of a job \u201cwill do very well re-skilling and adapting\u201d. Does he foresee any problems with the new world at all? People using it to start new religions? \u201cI don\u2019t know what to do about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neural decoding \u2026 the artist in Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future on Channel 4. Photograph: Swan Films<\/p>\n

We\u2019re then in southeast Asia to meet an \u201cexistential safety expert\u201d (ultra-modern prepper) living off-grid after his job as an AI safety consultant made him realise that \u201cthe most influential tech of all time\u201d had the least possible oversight (\u201cit just boggles the mind\u201d). Then we meet the man who demonstrates why he thinks his chatbot is becoming sentient. After that, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the preternaturally calm co-author of the bestselling book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, walks us through how easy it would be for a superintelligent AI to co-opt human labour, become self-sustaining and then dispense with humans altogether. If you\u2019ve made it to that point, well, good for you and your robust psyche \u2013 but are you sure you\u2019ve been listening?<\/p>\n

As ever, Perry is the man you want questioning these people. He approaches Andrea\u2019s thoughts with kindness and without judgment, asking her how she feels about a company not just having her data, but being something that could collapse and take Edward with it, and dwelling on the discomfort of knowing \u201cpeople are investing a very tender part of themselves\u201d in something shaped by the pursuit of profit.<\/p>\n

His keen discernment quickly distils the main issues raised after every interview. Does the youth of the average tech startup founder and employee mean they are unburdened by irrelevant fears and prejudices \u2013 or dangerously ignorant of what humanity is capable of doing with new tools? Is the rise of the chatbots evidence of the God-shaped hole inside us, and if so, is it worse to fill it with that than any other imaginary friend? And what do we do about all the vulnerable people \u2013 and how many new ways there will be to be vulnerable \u2013 whose lives, in which perhaps it is already difficult to distinguish between reality and artifice, real help and exploitation, will be made harder by the rise of the machines?<\/p>\n

And \u2013 a point brought out by meeting protesters around OpenAI\u2019s headquarters in San Francisco \u2013 what are we to make of the claims for a coming utopia when there are still homeless people on the streets, not least in the immediate vicinity of OpenAI\u2019s HQ? Perry is an intelligent and egoless enough man to let this dampen his previous excitement at the idea of all the class disruption to come (the current state of robotics v knowledge-crunching AI means that manual workers are much better positioned to survive the immediate future, innovative bioweapons from suburban despot cellars aside).<\/p>\n

Only one of the three episodes was available for review. I will be watching the others from an undisclosed location in southeast Asia. Goodbye, and good luck.<\/p>\n

Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future is on Channel 4 now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a fun game you can play while watching Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, the three-part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-394166","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}