AI: Promise or Peril ? Recorded at the Hay Festival
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Almost the first thing the newly chosen Pope Leo XIV did was to warn of the dangers of Artificial intelligence, of technological advance outstripping human wisdom. AI promises unapparelled efficiency, streamlined lives, complex problems solved in milliseconds. But will it make humans redundant literally and metaphorically? Will it hijack creativity? Will it imprison us in our prejudices? Will it destroy the concept of objective truth? AI: Promise or Peril? was recorded at The Hay Literary Festival
Witnesses: Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, author of Smartphone Nation: Why We're All Addicted to Our Screens and What You and Your Family Can Do About It Marcus Du Sautoy, author, mathematician and Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Dorian Lynskey Sir Nigel Shadbolt, longterm researcher of AI, Professor in Computer Science at Oxford University and government advisor.
Panellists: Anne McElvoy James Orr Mona Siddiqui Matthew Taylor Presenter: Michael Buerk
Producers: Catherine Murray & Peter Everett Production Co-ordinators: Brigid Harrison-Draper &Sam Nixon Thanks to Lucy Newman and the whole team at Hay.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good evening. Artificial intelligence promises a world of unparalleled efficiency, |
| 0:10.0 | medical breakthroughs, innovative solutions to humanity's greatest challenges. |
| 0:14.8 | Imagine personalised healthcare, intelligent assistance streamlining our lives, |
| 0:19.9 | complex problems solved in milliseconds. |
| 0:22.6 | But there's a shadow over this gleaming surface. Are we heading blindly into a future where |
| 0:28.2 | objective truth is replaced by algorithmically generated realities? Will millions lose their jobs |
| 0:34.7 | when intelligent machines outperform human labour? And what of the power |
| 0:38.9 | and wealth that AI will concentrate at the hands of a perhaps ill-intentioned few? Promise or peril, |
| 0:45.9 | as AI perhaps redefines what it means to be human? Now, I didn't write a word of that. I picked up my phone, I clicked on an app and typed, |
| 0:57.2 | do me an introduction to the Moral Mays program about AI, please. |
| 1:01.5 | I feel a strange need to be polite to these things. |
| 1:04.8 | It came up with what you just heard in less than a second. |
| 1:10.4 | Is this what redundancy feels like? |
| 1:14.6 | And my boss is in the audience, and it does. |
| 1:18.0 | Anyway, our panel here at the Hay Festival, irreplaceable surely by humans or machines. |
| 1:23.6 | Oh, I don't know, though. |
| 1:25.5 | And McElvoy, executive editor of the news and commentary site Politico, |
| 1:29.8 | Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and interreligious studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:34.4 | Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, |
| 1:38.1 | and James Orr, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University. |
| 1:43.3 | Mona, where are you on this? |
... |
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