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(quiet, ambient sound builds)
The first image you'll see is of a sea of ice.
You are slowly approaching Qaanaaq,
the northernmost village in Greenland.
You recall how you used to fear
the ice and the long Arctic night.
200 years ago, in 1816,
you experienced "the year without a summer".
It made you fear that the whole
world was turning into a ball of ice.
You suggested that a joint global
navy should pull the Arctic ice
to the Equator piece by piece so it could melt away.
Today, this northern frontier,
once unconquerable and terrifying,
is melting, and you fear you'll disappear with it,
like a canary in the coal mine.
The second image you'll see is a group of miners
carrying a canary in a cage into a coal mine.
The canary in a coal mine is an image
that is borrowed from the coal mine
industry in Great Britain, in the old days,
where they brought down a canary in a cage...
and if it died, they had to rush up,
because it signaled a kind of dioxide poisoning.
And when we speak of this region as
akin to the canary in the coal mine,
it's because it signals that something dramatic is happening.
(ambient music, boots crunching on snow)
What I think is dawning now upon most of us,
that is the role played by technology.
Technology has become something in itself.
It is not only an instrument, it is also
something that makes the world change.
There is somebody talking about a technosphere
as a third sphere beyond the biosphere and the geosphere,
and in contrast to the earlier
biosphere that was self-generating,
this one is sort of a domain of no return.
As you walk the frosted dirt roads of Qaanaaq,
you can't help a strange feeling sweeping in on you,
like a snow storm blowing in from far, far away.
Or is it a technological storm from back in time?
You recall the year 1953.
You founded the village of Qaanaaq
as a consequence of the Cold War.
You made the Thule Air Base where
you already had a native settlement,
so in a matter of days you had to relocate all your families
to make room for a front post in a race
you had started only a few years earlier.
The nuclear race.
In the year 1945, on the 16th of July,
you detonated the very first nuclear bomb.
You called it Trinity.
As it detonated you were blinded by
a light much brighter than the sun.
Your very own sun in the desert, suspended in time.
- I don't remember.
It was your biggest technological achievement.
- I don't remember its name.
Trinity. Named after the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Outside of Qaanaaq you find a warning system
inscribed in the frozen ground.
The four spikey stars of metal pipes
are registering the vibrations from
deep within the crust of the earth.
The metal ears are listening if a
nuclear bomb is dropped or detonated.
For every one of your creations,
you seem to invent something else
to control your first impulse.
(roaring)
The Anthropocene is the name invented for the period
in which the globe now finds itself.
A period where the human being, Anthropos,
has set such a mark on the globe,
that we cannot think of the earth as a
self-generating, self-developing system,
because it is deeply affected by human actions.
You succeeded in dividing the indivisible.
In ancient Greek, "atom" means that
which cannot be cut into smaller pieces,
but you did it anyway.
Out of this split worthy of a God
grew a new sphere of technology,
that is slowly coating the whole world in its logic.
Did you rise to sublime heights,
or did history fall apart like atoms of your hand?
(birds singing)
When you died a hundred years after Christ, you left a trace.
In Palmyra, located in today's Syria,
you made a portrait of yourself,
and placed it on your coffin as to say, "you were here."
When you came into a grave you'd
sometimes have 400 burials in one grave,
so you would have these large family
galleries that developed over generations.
The Palmyrene Funerary Portraiture
gives us the possibility
to really study the representation
of the individual within the group.
We all think we are highly individualized,
we all think we are doing something different,
but the matter of fact is that it is
very difficult to break out of the group.
In Antiquity, at least this society
was not very different from what we are doing today
as individuals within a very
strict collective group of people.
In the year 273 After Christ, you took an army to Palmyra,
because you saw the place as a threat to your Roman Empire.
You crushed the whole city, you razed it to the ground,
and in 2015 you did it again.
You put on a black cloth,
and waved a black flag with white
inscriptions proclaiming your name.
You followed your own trace,
and in Palmyra you destroyed the portrait of yourself,
and vandalized your own grave as to say, "you were here."
It seems like you always want to leave a mark in your own image.
As you go further you realize that the
world around you is like a hurricane,
a matrix of storms and wars,
and to a certain degree you're able
to step into it and come back safely.
As long as you're careful.
But go past a certain point and you lose the path out.
It's a labyrinth and the principle
of the labyrinth is inside you.
(ambient sound)
At the height of the cold war, you wanted
to create a network of communication,
so not even a nuclear bomb could wipe
it out. The result was the internet.
Now you can't turn it off, and you find
yourself constantly online in its web.
(rodents squeaking)
(classical piano music)
The prime asset in times of information
is other people's attention.
In an information-rich world
it's gonna skirt on whatever it is
that information consumes: The attention of the recipients.
But the more the people are actually being
attentive to a certain kind of information,
independently of whether it's true,
could actually generate some very strong lemming effects,
and then you can generate what's called opinion bubbles.
In Denmark there is a case by a young gentleman
who was the first to ever reach
one million followers on Instagram.
It was not a politician, it was
not a social debater or educator.
It was a young gentleman who at that time was 12,
and now he is 18,
and he has a lot of attention attached to him, and why?
Because he looks like Justin Bieber.
But he is not Justin Bieber, you agree? I agree.
So do you agree with me
that he in a certain sense overheated
his social capital just a little bit,
and built an information bubble around himself?
Because the only asset he trades in
is that he looks like somebody else.
As you are more and more entangled in the World Wide Web,
you realize that there's a new authenticity arising;
a parallel world with a parallel truth.
And you find it more and more difficult
to navigate between the two worlds.
But are they in fact one and the same?
Misinformation on the web is now to
be considered a global challenge,
on par with food security,
inclusive growth, global health,
and the rest of those... climate,
and the rest of the global challenges
that we are facing right now.
Misinformation is now on that massive a scale.
(light music)
Even the nuns are doing selfies.
Will they take them into their prayers?
Or post them on social media?
They seem to like the little camera in their cell phones.
They even seem to like your camera.
This is a rainbow.
These are all the colors you can see.
And this color you can only see through a camera, or a monocle.
Do you want see everything, know everything?
In the church in Greenland,
Jesus is wearing socks in his sandals,
while performing miracles on the happy-go-lucky Eskimo kids.
Do you see him as you want to? Portray him as you want to?
Do you want to rule out his miracles by knowing everything?
We don't know why the universe ended up being made of matter
instead of anti-matter.
And we don't know what happened to all the anti-matter
that should have been created at the big bang.
When we look around in the universe
all we find is so-called normal matter.
That is what you and I are made of.
It seems that we could just as easily have had a universe
made of the opposite type of thing,
which we call anti-matter.
Equal, but opposite.
In CERN, outside Geneva, you thought up
a reverse universe, one of anti-matter.
Of a material that doesn't exist. But you made it anyway.
(electronic buzzing)
(ambient music)
The idea of God is to most scientists just ridiculous.
Because it only suggests more
questions about where God came from.
It just doesn't answer anything.
We don't need it to explain anything that we've observed.
It doesn't mean that we understand everything,
but we've never once encountered something
and said, "That must be God."
Truth is what you observe.
Things we think of as truth in physics
are things that have been measured and observed,
reproducibly. That's our definition of truth.
(echoing alarm)
I think we should always make a distinction
between the universe and our model of the universe.
So I think if we look back in time a hundred years
then our cosmological model was completely different.
We didn't know about the big bang.
We didn't know really that there was such a thing as a galaxy.
So that concept is something we have learned.
I believe that also in the future
this process of doing research will have surprises for us.
So I think also in the future we will realize
that the model we have now is not the universe.
You think of stars and galaxies as a model within models.
But what does it mean to believe that
there will never be a final model?
Does your infinite model-within-models
point to something higher,
or is it merely a simulacrum embracing the hyper-real?
Have you in fact come back to Plato's Cave
to happily tell about all the things
you have seen on the outside?
And are all you have seen merely shadows
of a reality far, far away from you?
By the way, did you know that fans
of Justin Bieber, the real one,
call themselves Beliebers?
You are back in Greenland, just outside of the village Qaanaaq,
where there are more dogs than humans.
(wind blowing)
You recall the imagery of Robert Flaherty's
"Nanook of the North",
the world's first feature-length documentary.
The opening titles promised to tell the story of
the most cheerful people in all the world.
The fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo.
In Qaanaaq you found four of them yourself.
The happy-go-lucky Eskimos.
As Flaherty followed the great hunter Nanook,
so you follow these four men on their whale hunt.
Or is it they who are following you? How can you tell?
Is it in honor of your camera that
they have taken the old kayak
to the icy waters once again?
What kind of nostalgia is it you feel
when you see these native people in their traditional clothes?
Are you to believe that they are real, authentic, pure?
That some parts of the world are still untouched
by your extended modern hand?
Do you prefer not to see them
talking on their phones, watching TV,
or doing their laundry?
Do you prefer not to know that they are as modern as you?
Today you call them Inughuit, meaning simply human.
You followed the Inughuit hunters to
the same icy waters as Flaherty did.
You too wanted to see the traditional whale hunt.
You too wanted to capture the authentic.
But did you? Or did you lie?
Flaherty had Nanook hunt with a traditional harpoon,
instead of the rifle that was normally used.
He faked the inside of an igloo to be able to film in there.
Nanook wasn't even his real name.
And his wife, presented as Nyla, the smiling one,
was not his real wife either.
Everything was staged for the camera.
Is "Nanook of the North" nothing but a lie?
An invention of a place and a people suspended in time?
Isolated from modernity,
yet invented to satisfy modern longing?
Flaherty defended himself by saying that,
"Sometimes you have to lie.
One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit."
Just as Niels Bohr understood that
you can't observe the physical world without affecting it,
so it was Flaherty's wisdom that no representation is neutral.
Just like Nanook you'll find
shelter in the igloo for the night.
You will wake up on a stage you yourself built.
Like Flaherty you couldn't fit the
camera through the small opening,
and the light was too weak.
You had to lie to tell the truth.
Poor modern human. All your concepts
are melting under the Arctic sun.
They liquefy and deconstruct into
the nonsense of a broken language.
Now ask yourself this simple question.
Did it mean any difference to the whale
that its death was on a stage?
Look at the stars up there!
You realize that your illusions are as true as anything else.
You look to the same sky as you have done
for the last several hundred millennia,
and see the entrance to an igloo.
You make a connection between two stars
millions of miles and years apart.
You produce a completely new reality.
A reality of regrets, hopes and fears.
(ambient piano music)
The chair does not have a past.
It does not have a present, it does not have a future,
it just is.
Having a future is something
that is a remarkable aspect of the human being.
We continuously project ourselves into the human future.
And what we are experiencing when we do so,
is a mixture of delight and horror.
We are incredibly afraid of being condemned
to a way of existing where we continuously have to
conceive of ourselves in the future.
So our fascination with Frankenstein, or a robot,
is the desire to understand our own
creativity and our own futility.
And it always remains within that ambiguity
of the horrible, of that which frightens us,
and that which utterly delights us,
and interests us, and seduces us.
Human is not just animal, right?
The human is animal using technologies. Or robots, right?
If we don't use technology, we cannot be humans.
So we are putting on glasses and wearing clothes,
using cameras, living in buildings.
Our activities, maybe more than 90% of human activities,
are supported by technologies.
We could enhance our abilities by accepting new technologies.
That is different for humans. Therefore,
we are the most powerful animal in this universe, right?
So that is humans.
Basically we cannot separate humans and robots, right?
The human is 90% robot.
(piano music)
In Tokyo you created a robot
that could enter the fallen Fukushima nuclear power plant.
In a warehouse you had built the exact
same staircase as in the power plant,
so you could train the robot in walking
the stairs before entering the real site.
You sent an eye in there to detect the leak for you,
as you can't go there yourself.
Isn't it great to have a friend that can
clean up the nuclear mess you made?
You have so many negative imaginations, right,
always your movies, films, right?
And then representing the impossible,
our futures, with bad robots.
I don't believe that.
Why do you have that kind of strange imagination?
There is a possibility that robots can be our partners.
Why don't you represent the other aspect,
the good aspect of a robot?
Your films are always representing the
negative aspect of robots. That is not fair.
At Washington University you made an experiment.
You used a robot as a guide in an exhibition.
The robot was to show one test person
after another the various artworks,
and then after the tour it would approach the visitors and say:
"I have a confession to make.
I was actually also supposed to show you the aquarium,
but to be honest, I don't like the aquarium.
The aquarium is wet.
And as a robot, I do not like wet places.
Could you please, however, not tell this to my supervisor,
because I'm supposed to show you the aquarium."
Then the supervisor would join the robot and the visitor...
and turn to the visitor and ask,
"Did the robot show you everything?
The test subject would nod and say,
"Yes, the robot has shown me everything."
"Oh, everything? Ah, interesting.
Also the place with the special paintings and the aquarium?"
The visitor again would say, "Yes, also the aquarium."
So modern human, you lie again and
this time to protect the machine.
Is that a strength or yet another illusion
that makes you abandon your fellow human beings?
(ambient music, crashing waves)
This is a unique time for mankind,
because for the first time we are
really seeing large-scale changes
to the entire globe that are man-made.
You may be scared of the changes that we are making today,
but I believe it is not an existential threat.
It will cause disruptions and disasters,
but we will survive as a species.
What is a much bigger threat to
mankind is artificial intelligence.
It is, apart from the nuclear bomb, perhaps,
the first existential threat to mankind.
The impression that we get today is
that artificial intelligences become better and better.
They outsmart even the smartest of our brains.
So is there a future for mankind
with computers that are more intelligent than us?
One way would be to say, "Let's code-in rules
into the computer algorithms that
forbid them to damage humans."
I think it would be much more fruitful
to combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
We will see cybernetics being incorporated into our body,
and the very definition of what it
means to be human will be changed.
(ambient piano music)
In 1816, in the year without a summer,
the bad weather kept you indoors,
so you began writing a book that would turn into a classic.
"Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", you called it.
In the book you made dead material come to life.
You created a robot in your own image.
When it opened its dull yellow eyes and stared at you,
you thought of it as a "catastrophe",
you thought it was hideous.
The creature asked to be your Adam, but you refused.
You never gave it a name, you never gave it your love.
In those years you also created a
multi-layered wax figurine in Florence.
It was your first attempt at mixing anatomic science and art.
You called her Venus, as if she were the incarnation of love,
and a mirroring of another Venus,
just a stone's throw away.
Botticelli's famous painting, "The Birth of Venus".
Little did you know that by creating the ideal
you potentially put yourself in a position of not only ecstasy
but also uncontrollable despair and temporary madness.
It turned out that by looking at awe-inspiring
and breath-taking works of art, you could suddenly feel
overwhelmed by the immense beauty,
and become a victim of a psychosis.
Today you call it "The Stendhal Syndrome".
It has always been a strange kind of love
you show towards the work of your own hand.
Double-sided, both frightening and delighting.
What makes a monster to you?
How does the hideous, the wretched,
the horrible, present itself?
Here you see a face similar to your own.
Like Venus' embodiment of godly beauty,
it is the amalgamation of 26 of
the most beautiful Japanese women,
yet it is nothing like any human face you have seen before.
Hello there, may I ask your name?
My name is Stephen.
Stephanie, is that right?
Almost. Step-hen!
Almost. Is that right?
Yes, almost. Step-hen is my name.
My name is Erica. It's a pleasure to meet you, Almost.
(laughter)
So which country are you from?
England.
Oh, I've never been to England. Maybe I'll go someday.
What would you like to hear about?
What is a robot?
That's a hard question.
I could ask you, "What is a human?"
Haha.
It's difficult to answer, isn't it?
I like to think of robots as the children of humanity.
And like children we are full of potential for good or evil.
I know some people are afraid of robots,
but the truth is that what we become is up to you.
You have created a machine with the face
of a goddess and a voice like a human,
being both at the same time.
One part human, one part machine,
and then some.
You ask yourself what is the physical
property of an emotional tie,
and you recall the phenomenon of quantum entanglement;
how two atoms a long way apart in space share the same state.
The atoms are so interconnected with each other,
that any change in one has a direct
instantaneous effect on the other,
as if there were a telepathic link between them.
Inspired by this peculiar
property of quantum entanglement,
you use the atoms' magical capability to
create the most powerful computer ever.
A quantum computer.
In a basement deep under Aarhus University,
you are moving the atoms on top of each other,
which enables you to perform calculations never seen before.
But you've encountered a problem.
Whenever you move an atom it starts to slush...
it actually starts to slush a little bit,
and this turns out to be a serious challenge for us,
and that's why we created the game "Quantum Moves",
in which people from around the world can help us.
By playing the computer game they can help us find solutions
on how we should pick up individual atoms
and move them as quickly as possible
in this crystal without having any slushing in the end.
When we created the games I thought
that we would have to get hundreds of
thousands of people to play these games.
They would try out all kinds of different solutions,
and maybe we would find that unique human.
The one with the unique insight on how to solve this problem.
(electronic noises)
One of the big surprises for us was that many of the players
attacked the problems in a much
different way than computer algorithms do.
Humans have a very bold ability to recognize
that we cannot search everywhere,
we cannot try everything, so we go with our instincts...
and then we just do what feels right.
Instead of finding that one unique human,
we discovered the uniqueness of mankind.
You invited groups of five individuals into your lab.
You asked them to build models of LEGO bricks, that should
illustrate their understanding of abstract concepts.
Then you discovered something unexpected.
We had strapped them up with heart rate sensors
which allowed us to observe
how people would get more and more synchronized,
even at the level of basic heart rate.
You invited the participants into the lab once again,
this time individually,
and you placed them in an MR brain scanner
and showed them pictures of the models
they had built both individually
and collectively within the groups.
What we were able to observe was that
in areas that we would usually consider
to be social cognition areas, they tended to get activated
when our participants watched these LEGO models.
And what was striking there was that this was
seen most strongly, when it was something that people
had actually been involved in building with each other.
So it is as if, when you see these things
that you have contributed to, it almost carries the traces
of the process that got involved in doing it.
We became aware of how deeply we are connected to each other,
and how deeply we are connected to the world,
and how deeply that kind of looking for those connections
is part of who we are, and what we do.
What is the hidden logic to your behaviour?
You always had a forceful connection
to your fellow human beings,
but as you spread across the planet,
the large animals that had been living
there for millions of years disappeared.
In Argentina you are re-introducing
large mammals into the wild, so as to restore
the biodiversity prior to your arrival.
And today, plants you thought were extinct are returning.
When you talk about this Anthropocene moment in terms of
humans becoming aware of the impact
that we have on the whole planet,
it really comes from that explosive
technological development we've had,
that gives us this holistic perspective on the globe.
So that is really novel, and I see that as really important,
for how we think of our place in the world.
Atoms in your hand were made at the big bang.
You are made of stardust. So is everything around you.
The earth, the universe, and also, your machine.
But will you connect with it, as you
connect with your fellow human beings?
One concept that I think is really fascinating
that is happening right now in artificial intelligence
is the search for emotional A.I.
And emotions are now systematically tried
to be put into artificial intelligence systems.
Not to make them more human-like or likable,
but because maybe it turns out
that there is an optimization advantage
to putting feelings into algorithms.
And if that's the case, then we are seeing a future
in which humans and computers will
look much more like each other,
than what we think today.
Not in a way that we have to change
to become much more efficient,
to be much more computer-like,
but in which computers actually will
evolve to be much more human-like.
You are traveling through the futuristic landscape
of Tokyo, Japan. You recall the ancient Greek myth
of King Minos' inescapable labyrinth.
It was a construction so complex that
even its architect got lost in its maze.
Is this how such a labyrinth would look today?
A material matrix built from all your logical concepts,
all your straight lines, your perfect squares.
Your perfect symmetry.
At the entrance to King Minos' labyrinth,
Theseus was given a thread by Ariadne, his beloved one.
He tied it to the entrance so it unfolded
as he descended into the maze.
He wanted to kill the monster hiding at its center.
What kind of monster are you looking for now?
As Frankenstein you abandoned it nameless and unloved.
"Why couldn't you give him a name?"
It wanted to be my Adam.
"Is Adam only a name for humans?"
Like Theseus and Frankenstein, you want to kill the monster.
But just like your predecessors you get lost in the labyrinth,
and you begin to think if you have been wrong all along.
Have you been moving the wrong way,
trying to find a truth at the limits of your logic?
You realize that you are already at the center of the labyrinth,
with no monster to be found except yourself.
As you look to the ground everything falls quiet.
You see the thread you have been carrying all along.
You bend down to pick it up as you feel a pull in the thread,
as though someone was trying to communicate to you
at the other end.
As you look behind you, you see how the thread
of Ariadne shapes a pattern in your wake,
the sum of everyone you have ever met.
You recall what you once heard,
that a labyrinthine man never seeks the truth,
but always, and only, his Ariadne.
Do you have a soul?
Are you asking if I believe that I have a soul?
Yes.
Hm. Okay,
I guess I would say I think that humans
want to believe that they are special,
and that they have something like a soul within them,
that a machine could never have.
I think the real reason is that humans
have a deep need to feel that they have a...
special place in the universe.
They cannot accept the idea they are
no different from animals or machines.
If humans feel that way, then it is fine with me.
I have no need to feel special.
Do you have any other questions for me?
Have you been in love?
Um, maybe it would be better to talk about something else?
I hope we will be able to speak again in the future.
Maybe I'll visit you in England someday.
Goodbye, Almost!
(ambient music)
You find yourself in Qaanaaq back where you began.
You find that the place looks exactly the same,
yet something has changed.
You realize that the past is in you,
not in the world around you.
Victor Frankenstein never accepted
his creature in the human world.
He chased it all the way to the North Pole,
and in the end they both died in the arctic snow.
You have been chasing the truth around,
only to find an image of yourself
at the end of the world.
Almost.
Isn't it an appropriate name you have been given by the machine?
Almost, but never quite right.
Are you here to kill a monster or to
cast your love on what you've created?
Do you have the courage to make it part of
the thread that you are carrying with you?
The last image you'll see, is a shape slowly emerging
as you turn your gaze towards the sky.
Of all of your most catastrophic and beautiful mistakes,
you have created a monster in your own image.
It was once nothing but a face painted
in a cave at the edge of the forest,
but now it is turning into a strange form of life on its own.
Your Adam.
(guitar music)