Speaker 3
Yeah, I am. I think AI has the potential to solve a lot of our problems. If it can invent fantastically efficient solar panels and batteries and design bacteria that can eat radioactive waste and plastic pollution and output something benign, these are all things that are possible. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, in terms of a tool and humanity,
Speaker 2
there are certain technologies that have changed us as a species. You could argue maybe the printing press, use of fire. I don't know, things like that. Where does AI come into that? Do you think it's going to be one of those tools that will have such a profound effect on us as a species in the way that we behave that it will change us?
Speaker 3
I do really think there will be a post AI society and the pre AI society. I do think the effect will be that big in the same way that it's very hard for people born after the invention of the internet to understand just what society was like before
Speaker 2
all of humanity's information was accessible at the click of a button. For me, the biggest tech pre internet was like dial a disc. I was moving house recently and I found an Ein Carter CD. Wait, what was Ein Carter as an encyclopedia? That was Microsoft's encyclopedia. I grew up with a BBC Micro, that was for me playing jetpack and things like that. And now imagine we're in a world where just using your phone, you can go and ask GPT to write a short story about X, Y, or Z and it will do it. GPT is freaky. Can I just ask just before we end, what's your favourite, funnest, craziest AI story?
Speaker 3
My favourite one of recent months has been Get Back the Beatles documentary. They had this enormous treasure trove of footage, but it was all shot on one camera, one microphone. So you'd have the band playing, but you'd have background chats, you'd have roadies, dropping boxes and things. And they used an AI to go in and select every different part of that audio so that they could focus in exactly on Paul's bass or what Ringo was saying to George, or they could then focus on a chat in the backgrounds that someone was having. It's incredible, they took all this footage which was basically unusable and created something absolutely amazing from it. That is amazing actually,
Speaker 2
cricky. Actually funny, I had a Beatles AI story. Years and years ago, I had this idea for a movie. I read it up as a page, as a treatment and it lived in it draw forever. And the idea for my movie was I wanted to imagine that this guy went back in time or woke up and the Beatles didn't exist, but he had memory of the Beatles and then he could write all the Beatles songs, but he got them a bit wrong, they were a bit shit because he couldn't write all the lyrics. And then someone made that movie. And when it came up, I was like, cricky. Now, if I had AI instead of just that piece of paper sitting in my drawer, I could have plugged it into chat GPT and it would have zapped it out and I would have got there
