I myself went to a slightly crazy school, which- King Alfred’s in Hampstead, which is an admirable school in many ways actually. A private school, and it has always been run and still is by really delightful people who’ve got a lovely view of the world. It’s got minimum restrains, minimum discipline, which has its pros and it has its cons. I personally think the real problem is that to be effective you absolutely need certain skills which take a lot of effort to learn, certainly for languages which I’m hopeless at. I mean I know these are difficult and time consuming and boring because I’m so bad at them myself because I didn’t have the energy to or the interest to learn these things. I now regret enormously that my French, my German, are hopeless. My mathematics could be an awful lot better if I had had the sort of discipline at an early age to- to learn the necessary nitty gritty facts and ideas and concepts and skills, you know. So somehow a school has to engender the basic skills that you need and also have the freedom to allow you to use them in the way you want to use them, develop them the way you want to go, and I don’t know how one combines these two. Somehow you need both, I think. Personally, I’ve never had enough sort of discipline really. I’ve had to develop that as I’ve gone along, I think, to discipline myself. I don’t know, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it, really? Again, you know, I just wonder whether machines are going to come in here. I’d like to plug in French into my brain so when I go to France I plug in there, when I go to Germany I plug in another bit. I mean how much could machines, you know, solve these silly problems?
Is that part of your AI work?
Yeah. I actually think we’ll be very intimate with AI devices which, you know, really augment our own limitations. I think we’ll deal very, very closely with more or less intelligent machines into the future, is what I think will happen. I think, hopefully, I think it will be great actually, why not? And after all, I mean if one does carpentry, one extends one’s hands using chisels and screwdrivers and saws, and they’re obviously different from our hands which is why we need them, your hands can do certain things, these can do others. And the same with mental abilities. I think we need similar sort of idea of technology extending our brain, extending our eyes as with telescopes and microscopes, but actually also for thinking itself and my belief is this is how technology will go, I think it will go into actual thinking. Then, of course, you’re going to be left with emotional psychology and emotional problems in life and to think of a machine solving emotional problems is, at the moment, I think beyond comprehension or understanding and may never happen, I don’t know.
