Transcriber: Charisse Renica Reviewer: Quan Nguyen
When I was ten years old, the most ruthless
gangster and drug dealer in the city, moved in next door.
As you can imagine, this wasn't what my parents had hoped for or imagined
for themselves or for us, their children.
We lived in what was at the time called Port Elizabeth.
Community we lived in was a product of apartheid,
where people of color had been forcefully uprooted and sent to live on
and sent to live on the outskirts of cities.
The people in my community were kind.
That hopes and dreams.
We knew all our neighbors. But our community struggled.
It struggled with poverty, unemployment, gangsterism, drugs and violence.
Despite all of these things, my childhood seemed normal to me.
My parents were teachers. Every day they took us to school.
Weekends with a highlight for me.
Not just because I might get to watch Saturday morning cartoons.
But because on Saturdays my parents would usually take us for
a walk to our local library.
It was about 1.5 kilometres away, just under a mile
To get there,
we had to cross an open field, a railway line and a bridge over a highway.
It was hot, noisy, dusty and busy.
But once we got to the library, it was all worth it.
Inside the library was cool, hushed.
The only sounds were muted voices and the rustle of pages.
It smelled of books and wood polish and wax crayons.
The library to me was like a restaurant.
The authors were chefs serving up different types of cuisine. Mystery.
Suspense. Adventure. Science fiction. Books were items on the menu.
Rich slices of someone else's imagination.
I didn't just read books, I devoured them.
Through reading, I traveled to places I had never been.
Meet characters I’d never seen. And experienced emotions I’d never felt.
When I read it, I felt as if my imagination were exploding.
We use our library cards and check out as many books as we could.
We'd step back out of the library into the heat, the noise and the busyness.
South Africa at the time was all about those contrasts.
The duality and dichotomy of experiences.
The wonders of the library.
Versus the broken glass on the playgrounds where we played.
The gangster next door versus the futuristic utopias in my imagination.
As I grew older, my imagination served me well.
I imagined finishing school, studying away from home in a different city.
And traveling to different places overseas.
Once I finished high school, I was able to do many of those things.
And not for a moment. Am I suggesting that
all of the good things that happened to me were because of my imagination?
But my imagination was a vital ingredient. You see for me?
You see, for me the first step towards having a different life is imagining it.
Think about it. Your hopes and your dreams come from your imagination.
And your goals. Or goals are just dreams with direction.
You might think of your imagination as being wispy and insubstantial.
But your imagination is real. It's concrete and it shapes your reality.
Look around. From the seats you sit in. To the screens you stare at every day.
The information you consume to artificial intelligence itself.
Every single thing created by humans
started off in someone’s imagination.
Imagination is what society is built on.
Which brings us to an important question.
What is the future of imagination or humanity?
As we see, technologies like artificial intelligence
which can imagine and create
ultrarealistic images, stories, books, music, even films.
What is the future of imagination for humanity?
Will artificial intelligence spark our own imagination?
Will artificial intelligence become a crutch for our imagination?
We become passive consumers. What it has to imagine on our behalf.
But when I think about these questions,
I think back to that library from my childhood to those books,
those rich slices of someone else's imagination.
Was I a passive consumer off what those authors imagined in their books?
Well, yes I was. To their imagination through their books.
Did that reduce my imagination or diminish my capacity to imagine?
No, quite the opposite. Their imagination provided the inspiration for mine.
Their imagination kindled the flames of my own.
Same is true of artificial intelligence.
We must be cautious.
Our imagination. And technologies like artificial intelligence,
which come from our imagination, reflect who we are as people.
We have taught artificial intelligence to read, to write,
to sing, to speak, to create.
I think that's part of our preoccupation with artificial intelligence,
is that we have created artificial intelligence in our own image.
Reflected in artificial intelligence we see.
Ourselves.
The light. And the dark.
Good. And the bad.
Artificial intelligence isn't just a tool.
Artificial intelligence is a mirror held up to our society.
It’s up to us to decide whether it reflects the best
or the worst parts of our imagination.
Artificial intelligence provides us an opportunity to reflect on our values,
purpose and priorities as individuals and as a society.
Can we imagine using artificial intelligence to help us to solve
some of the biggest challenges facing society,
like poverty, unemployment, violence
The negative effects of climate change.
Can we imagine a world in which artificial intelligence helps us to
reconcile those global issues with our individual circumstance?
To reconcile global citizenship with individual identity.
To hold in dynamic tension. The light and the dark.
The good and the bad of our society.
I imagine that we will.
So what is the future of imagination for humanity?
The future of imagination isn't computer chips or batteries.
The future of the imagination isn't computers
or even artificial intelligence itself.
The future of imagination isn’t me.
The future of imagination is you.
I started my story, telling you about
the gangster moved in next door and it’s only fair. But I finished that story.
One morning we were woken by a loud bang. Outside, there was a huge commotion.
Police cars screeched to a halt outside and police with big guns jumped out.
See, someone had tried to assassinate that gangster. They train a hand grenade?
Yes. A hand grenade from a moving car.
Eddie's house bounced off the wall of his house.
Hit the boundary wall between our properties, destroying it.
Thankfully, no one was harmed.
But that's probably not the most surprising part of that story.
The most surprising part of that story
is the fact that my parents still sent us to school that day.
[Laugh]
Few people I’ve told that story to in the past, they’ve always been shocked.
But once they get over their initial shock,
they usually respond with three simple words.
And you imagine.
Well. Can you?
Thank you.