David Marchese , The New York Times Magazine; Stephen Fry Would Like to Remind You That You Have No Free Will
"You said earlier you’ve been reading philosophy. Is there a particular idea that you’re tickled by lately? I suppose the real biggie is free will. I find it interesting that no one really talks about it: I would say that 98 percent of all philosophers would agree with me that essentially free will is a myth. It doesn’t exist. That ought to be shocking news on the front of every newspaper. I’m not saying we don’t look both ways before we cross the road; we decide not to leave it to luck as to whether a car is going to hit us. Nor am I saying that we don’t have responsibility for our actions: We have agency over the body in which our minds and consciousness dwell. But we can’t choose our brains, we can’t choose our genes, we can’t choose our parents. There’s so much. I mean, look at the acts of a sociopath, which are performed with absolute will in the sense that he means to do what he’s doing, but he’s doing it because he has desires and impulses which he didn’t choose to have. Nobody elects to be a sociopath. The difference between us and them is one of degree. That certainly interests me. But, generally speaking, I suppose ethics is the most interesting. You do wonder if there are enough people in the world thinking about the consequences of A.I. and technology...
What’s so interesting now is that in 20 or 30 years, we will be in exactly the same ethical positions as Prometheus and Zeus. We will say, “A.I. has reached this event horizon, this transformative moment in which it becomes self-conscious.” Will we then say we have to turn those machines off — be like Zeus — and not give A.I. fire? Or some will be like Prometheus. They will say, “Give A.I. fire; it would be fantastic to watch these creatures have their own will.""
