Philip Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…No, I’m sure we haven’t stopped producing them. My book about myths was actually about what I call the modern myths, and it’s exactly those stories. I begin with the earliest one that I look at from early modern times, Robinson Crusoe, and I bring it right through. It wasn’t difficult to identify the candidates for that status. They were things like Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes. The latest myth I look at in that book is Batman. That’s 100 years old now. Actually, it’s amazing to think that that’s the case, but it virtually is. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that we have stopped this process of inventing modern myths, but I feel that it probably takes at least 50 years before some new narrative clearly acquires that mythic status. I think that one of them that is now emerging is the zombie myth. The idea of zombies is an old one. It started to become popularized in western culture in the 1930s, but I think it was really crystallized in the B movie horror films of the 1960s, particularly the George Romero films. I think that we now all have a sense that the zombie myth is something about the zombie apocalypse. It’s not individual zombies; it’s humanity overrun by a horde of mindless zombies. That’s the basis of the myth. We have that now, and I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to continue to develop myths. What I argue in that book is that these narratives acquire mythic status because they satisfy some need in us to explore social anxieties in stories in a way that allows us to look at them and explore them and think about them. Myths are tools for thinking with. They don’t have a moral; they don’t have a clear conclusion. They allow us to explore those anxieties. Sadly, there will always be new anxieties that arise. We already have to some extent a mythology of AI. That’s absolutely going to be a nexus around which certain mythologies are going to start growing. That’s because it’s a new technology. It’s an old idea, but now that it’s becoming a reality, those anxieties are really, really strong and with us and prevalent. So, we’re going to need myths to explore them. One thing I feel about that is that there are pros and cons to that, because the myth that we have around AI — and it’s one that’s being fed at the moment, sometimes, by tech companies even — is of the AI apocalypse, the AI takeover: that suddenly AI becomes super intelligent and it has no need for us, and it wipes out humanity. That, I think, is a very convenient myth for AI companies because it’s something that’s out there in the indefinite future, and they can say, “Oh, sure, we’re worrying about that, and we’re taking care of that.” Whereas the real dangers and risks and things to be worried about with AI are much more mundane things that are here and now: deep fakes, the production of misinformation, the trivial but sometimes important misuses of AI because we attribute it too much power. bout with AI are much more mundane things that are here and now: deep fakes, the production of misinformation, the trivial but sometimes important misuses of AI because we attribute it too much power. Those are the things that we should really be concerned about now. It could be that the myths that we develop get in the way of the things we should really be worrying about in the here and now. Let’s turn now to your new book again, How Life Works, A User’s Guide to the New Biology, which I enjoyed very much and learned a great deal from. A simple question: Let’s say an octopus loses an arm, and then the arm can grow back. What exactly in the octopus knows to grow the arm back and where to have that growth stop? What’s regulating this response? Because if I lose an arm, that doesn’t grow back. I don’t have that regulator.…

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