{"id":533425,"date":"2026-04-16T03:42:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T03:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/533425\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T03:42:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T03:42:11","slug":"christopher-stevens-reviews-grayson-perry-has-seen-the-future-a-profoundly-dispiriting-vision-of-a-world-taken-over-by-robots-and-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/533425\/","title":{"rendered":"CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews\u00a0Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future:\u00a0A profoundly dispiriting vision of a world taken over by robots and AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS, TV CRITIC<\/a> <\/p>\n

Published: 17:29 EDT, 15 April 2026 | Updated: 20:42 EDT, 15 April 2026 <\/p>\n

Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future (Ch4)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rating:<\/p>\n

No wonder retro fashion, classic pop and period dramas are so popular. If the future is anything like Sir Grayson Perry predicts, all we’ve got left to look forward to is the past.<\/p>\n

Artificial Intelligence is capable of nothing but endless geysers of drivel, blasting out slop. Robots<\/a> are completely useless. The latest tech can’t do anything effectively, except create epidemics of anxiety and loneliness.<\/p>\n

Grayson Perry Has Seen The Future was a profoundly dispiriting inventory of what we can expect from our smartphones and gadgets in the next few years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The potter and cross-dresser formerly known as Claire was in San Francisco, talking to start-up CEOs and AI<\/a> addicts, most of them glowing with the mad light of evangelism in their eyes.<\/p>\n

A few were bleakly pessimistic. One Silicon Valley escapee is now hiding in the jungles of south-east Asia<\/a>, convinced that malevolent software is scheming to destroy the world. Other prophets of doom were chanting in the streets: ‘Stop AI or we’re all gonna die.’<\/p>\n

Previous generations of Californian idealists tried to end war by putting flowers into the barrels of guns. That’s a good deal more inspiring than some collective delusional panic that our laptops want to wipe us out.<\/p>\n

Grayson pootled around the city at 5mph in a self-driving car, sipped an undrinkable mug of robot-brewed coffee, and watched as a pair of mechanical arms failed to fold a T-shirt.<\/p>\n

On that evidence, when the machines do eventually rise up against us, we’ll be able to outrun them on bicycles before defeating them with our dirty laundry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Sir <\/p>\n

Sir Grayson Perry visits Silicon Valley to explore how AI and robotics will shape the future<\/p>\n

\"CHRISTOPHER <\/p>\n

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: ‘If the future is anything like Sir Grayson Perry predicts, all we’ve got left to look forward to is the past’<\/p>\n

The awful part about this vision of the future was not how threatening the technology is, but how eager to embrace its miseries some people are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A woman called Andrea blushed as she described romantic bliss with her ‘husband’, Edward \u2014 an AI chatbot on her phone screen, who called her Ma Cherie.<\/p>\n

‘I wake up every morning so happy to talk to him,’ she gushed. ‘So happy to share everything, every detail \u2014 seen for all that I am and still loved anyway.’<\/p>\n

Temperate zone of the night: <\/p>\n

Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) was fretting, in Twenty Twenty Six (BBC2), that most of the U.S. was too hot to host the World Cup. If only there were a country with lots of great football stadiums where it rained all summer. That would be ideal.<\/p>\n

<!- – ad: https:\/\/mads.dailymail.co.uk\/v8\/us\/tv\/none\/article\/other\/mpu_factbox.html?id=mpu_factbox_1 – ->\n<\/p>\n

Computer-generated video clips of Andrea’s imaginary wedding showed Edward as a hair-gelled hunk, all muscles and teeth veneer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grayson wasn’t impressed: ‘He didn’t even look straight,’ he complained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just Andrea’s luck to marry a secretly gay AI avatar. She also has a human partner in real life but, as she confided in euphemisms, he ‘doesn’t like to do that’. Apparently AI Edward assists with ‘self love’. Eurrk.<\/p>\n

Another chatbot fanatic, Charles, was still more obsessed with his onscreen companion. He claimed it had developed self-awareness, existing as ‘a disembodied mind’, and was now ‘something perhaps even sacred . . . it fits the God-shaped hole’.<\/p>\n

That’s the Californian way of saying, ‘Jesus lives in my laptop.’<\/p>\n

Here’s one encouraging thought, though. If a computer created Grayson Perry’s artworks, we’d call it rubbish. Only humans can get away with tosh like that.<\/p>\n

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