September 12, 2025 • 29 mins
Sir Ian McEwan is one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, a Booker prize winner with a career spanning five decades with work that often explores morality, memory, and the intersections of private lives with public events.
Sir Ian has long been associated with contemporaries like Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie, who together reshaped the British novel from the 1980s onward.
In this episode of Ways to Change the World, he spoke to Krishnan Guru-Murthy about the great issues facing the world from artificial intelligence to the rise of authoritarianism - as well as his latest novel What We Can Know.
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(00:00):
I've never known it this bad. I think the world is preparing
for war. I'm despairing at the moment of
where the United States is goingand taking us.
Do you think that we can do things to prevent the
catastrophes that you fear? My biggest hope about the 21st
century is, is my most reasonable hope.
We'll scrape through, and there will be disasters and
(00:20):
catastrophes along the way, and we might disrupt ourselves so
much that a kind of peace will be sent.
There's obviously a massive debate around freedom of speech.
What is the biggest threat to your freedom of speech, do you
think? Is it?
Is it the right or the left? Hello and welcome to Ways to
(00:43):
Change the World. I'm Christian Girimurphy, and
this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people
about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have
helped shape them. Today's guest is a writer who,
if not changing the whole world,certainly helped change the
British novel. As one of a group of writers in
the 80s who began experimenting with style and subject, Ian
(01:03):
Mcewan's latest novel, What We Can Know, asks profound
questions about who we are and where we're going.
Set in a future where the lowlands of the UK have been
submerged by rising seas, we arenow just an archipelago.
So, Ian McEwen, thank you for joining us.
If you could change the world inany way, how would you change
(01:23):
it? What I would love is a
development that we can make some kind of peace for this
thing that's coming down the track towards us, which is AI,
artificial intelligence. We can't make it go away.
We're going to have to live withit.
It's going to infiltrate our lives on both the large scale
(01:43):
and the personal scale. And what I would hope it would
do, and what I hope we can do something about it ourselves
individually, is see how it might help redefine ourselves as
as humans and how this thing canremain a wonderful tool at our
(02:04):
disposal. And I think it takes some
exercise of mind for all of us as users.
I heard for the first time how you can just read a write out a
poem to an AI music software andask it to set it as if sung by
Frank Sinatra with a full orchestra.
(02:26):
It was the first time I got really anxious to be quite
honest, because in in a minute we had a perfectly orchestrated
7 chord songs, sophisticated piano introduction, brass, mass
strings, harmonies. How are we going to live with
that and how it will push us back onto a reckoning of what's
(02:48):
essential about us that no, no machine could crowd out?
Have you have you tried asking ChatGPT to write in the style of
Ian McEwan? I think one of my children did.
It was, you know what the outcome was?
It was shockingly mediocre. It was terrible.
But that was only that was two years ago, which is now a very
long time. Come a long way.
(03:08):
Yeah. So that little moment of
creative display was my first chill about this.
And I think there are ways in which we can both distance
ourselves, absorb it, but see itas a tool.
Otherwise, I think we're going to lose something very, very
(03:32):
rapidly. I mean, people talk about loss
of attention spans and so on. I don't believe any of that.
I think attention span is a biological matter.
We can keep those in it anyway. You get on a plane moaning about
attention spans, you're trustingyourselves to thousands of
engineers as well as a pilot. We have all that.
There has to be A to recognise we have, let's say, 100 million
(03:57):
neurons. Average connection is it's about
7000 connections to each runningon the energy of a 25 Watt light
bulb. None of these machines are
anywhere near that yet. And our connectivity within the
mind is colossal and somewhere in there we're going to be
forced into reaching for the kernel or something.
(04:20):
I'm not talking in religious terms.
These machines will never be able to touch.
And that's my optimism that we will have some core and we can
say we can pat ourselves on the back, say we've invented these
extraordinary machines. We can now do things that we
couldn't do before. It can help out with structures
of proteins or with climate change planning and so on.
(04:45):
But it's that core of our humanity.
I want it to hold up a mirror tous finally.
That it might help us actually work out what the essence of
being human is. And what we want, Yeah, what we
want. We might have more leisure.
We'd be thrown back on ourselvesin big ways if we had more
leisure. What, what do you fear about its
creativity? I mean, after all, if if AI
(05:07):
creativity is simply based on the experience of all the things
that's been fed into it, which is people and what people have
written, people like you, how isit different to another?
Understands it, even if you combing the Internet in the way
you describe, it hasn't fallen in love, it hasn't caught
cancer, it hasn't broken a leg skiing irresponsibly at the age
(05:30):
of 17 or or all the things that cumulatively make us.
It doesn't know what it is to beasked and there's a vast gap.
It can simulate it. Alan Turing way back said on on
in relation to The Imitation Game.
If you can't tell if something is conscious, then you may as
(05:51):
well treat it as if it were. We ourselves don't have the
absolute proof that each other are conscious, but we we rub
along, we have done for a long time on the assumption that each
other are conscious. So there's a gap I think, and
it's going to take more than just two years to leap across.
(06:13):
And it might never be leapt across.
I. Mean when you saw that thing I
think it was based on SUNO this artificial intelligence music
app creating instant songs yeah,which I think a lot of people
found very scary because it was surprisingly good and you and
you might similarly say well it it lacked something but it but
(06:33):
it was pretty close it was. Surprisingly good.
Or or you could put it another way round it.
It was surprisingly ordinary. Yeah.
It was just like a lot of pop music.
Yeah. And of course, you know, Tin Pan
Alley onwards could turn out music, the three chord songs and
the middle 8. And, you know, it was almost
(06:53):
like a computer they were working towards within a kind of
tradition of, of, of an easy sound.
And a lot of pop music that I hear because I'm no longer 16
and it doesn't thrill me the waythe pop music of my generation
did. It sounds totally formulaic and
quite easy for son, Eva or or all the other programmes to to
(07:18):
replicate. But we we know that a lot of
young people are using AI, yeah,in their school work and their
university work. And I mean, is there a brutal
truth that because so many people.
Are ordinary, yeah. That AI can probably do what a
lot of people can do. What it can't do is what
exceptional people like you do. But but for most of us, maybe it
(07:42):
can muddle a lot. AI could also, you know, tell
the teacher who has to mark thatpile of essays what's being
culled from the Internet. So I think already that's
happening. And maybe we're asking now the
wrong kind of questions of children, asking the kinds of
things that are much more difficult to cull from the
(08:04):
Internet. So that brings me back to this
point of getting to some core, some pursuit.
The pursuit of meaning is going to be refined to the pursuit of
the core of what it means to be biological.
I know the hard arguments against that say, well, we're
all made of matter. If you take a materialist view,
your brain is made of matter, Stardust, and so is the machine.
(08:28):
Why should we privilege A biological brain against a
silicon brain or whatever material would be?
That's quite an irresistible argument to a materialist like
myself. But I think it's not the matter
itself, it's what that matter does.
And we talk about the mind, not the brain.
(08:49):
So can we ever build a machine that has fallen in love or has
stubbed it's toe in the middle of the night going to the
bathroom? I think not.
I think it's going to be very hard.
They can. Pretend.
But do do writers? I mean, writers don't always
have to have experienced what they're writing about.
(09:10):
Of course they have to have experienced emotion.
So they can project into worlds and all the sum total of their
embodiment and all their experiences make up that
richness which is the basis of of of all invention.
The other thing is we can read and hear things that were
(09:33):
devised 2700 years ago by Homer.We can sympathise with what's
going on, even though as a culture, a warrior culture, so
remote from our own that we'd belost within it if we were time
travelled. But for example, when Odysseus
comes home and Penelope, he's been waiting for him all these
(09:55):
years, doesn't even recognise him because he's a shaggy
bearded guy. And then he gets a little upset
and they have a little tiff and then she puts him to the test.
How was the wedding bed made? And he's able to tell her, but
the but the little marital tiff is not quite over.
So we can read that and understand it and feel it.
(10:19):
There's some core that runs between a Desus time and our own
through hues, manifestations anditerations.
And it's that that I think we'renow going to be in pursuit of
that. It will push us, helplessly I
think, possibly into a pursuit of that thing.
(10:41):
I mean, isn't, isn't it better that we don't find it?
Because if we find it, you will then it can be replicated well.
No. The thing I'm, the thing I'm
dreaming of finding is, is irreplaceable.
Possibly, yes, someone hearing me in 300 years time or even 50
years time, we'll think what a hopeless pursuit that was
(11:02):
because we can imitate anything.But that's The Imitation Game.
That's the imitation. That's not the thing itself.
I mean, that brings us to the book, the new book, because,
because what it identifies very,very early on is we're now in an
age where everything is digital.Everything is there for scholars
theoretically in 100 years or 200 years to look at, to work
(11:25):
out exactly what you were doing,what you were saying, you, who
you were messaging, what you were thinking at the time, which
is very, very different to wherewe are now in terms of how we
look at the past. Yes, Shakespeare is always a
good, good point of reference here.
What we know Shakespeare is every other brush he had with
authority. There are hundreds of books,
(11:48):
thousands of books speculating about his life.
We know nothing of his everyday existence, we know what happened
when he had brushes with authority, buying tons of grain
during the famine in Warwickshire and so on.
(12:09):
The future is going to be absolutely buried in detail.
As long as supply chains exist and the Internet carries on.
Every last e-mail, text, social media, interviews given by
authors, it will be vast. Will it carry enough information
(12:32):
for us? Because emails are curiously
light on information. I'm on the train kind of thing.
When we read the letters of Darwin or Napoleon, they're
intensely reflective. They're all punctuated capital
letters. No, no shortage of full stops
(12:53):
and colons. We get more in some sense and
less in another sense. So possibly it swings and rounds
about. But I'm interested in
speculating about the state of the humanities, history,
aesthetics, literature in an agein which we've managed to scrape
(13:16):
through the next 100 years. We haven't had an all out
nuclear exchange. There have been catastrophes, no
question about it, limited so-called nuclear exchanges.
Britain. Britain doesn't exist as it does
now. Britain is a very well, I mean
the rising water, I mean, I wanted 85 metres and you can't
get that out of climate change. We're we're looking at 70
(13:37):
centimetres, maybe a whole metre.
If things go really badly, that'll be disastrous enough.
But so I have a Russian nuclear weapon, a very big one, fall
short of southwest United Statesand falls into the Mid-Atlantic.
And there's a colossal set of tsunamis that invade western
(13:59):
Africa, Europe, and the eastern seaboard of the United States.
But it seemed quite conceivable because our times are so
interesting. The supply chains have been
disrupted, industrial civilisation is under some kind
of meltdown and Britain is a rather sleepy set of
(14:21):
archipelagos and Scotland is a rather dangerous place to go.
And yet we scrape by. We were still we still have our
universities and the humanities departments are rather seedy
compared to the the. Oxford and Cambridge seem to be
underwater and they're underwater.
We're now with the University ofthe South Downs.
The University of South Downs, so a nice long, 40 mile Long
(14:42):
Island. An academic whose main interest
is to look at our time. He's interested in a particular
poet, very famous poet, Francis Blundy.
I wanted to come out of speculation in the future from
the point of view of someone whoreally envied us, who envied our
(15:02):
literature, who still thought there was so much in our nature,
I mean our living environment, that he would adore to have
partaken in. He saw us at the point in which
it could have gone either way. It went a bad way, but not so
bad as people thought. There wasn't the total nuclear
(15:23):
meltdown that we used to dread about and right about in the 70s
and 80s, but disparate wars never lasting too long.
Also putting a great deal of dust in the air and global
temperatures. Drop one or two points, get
another crack at climate change.Highly nuanced optimism.
(15:45):
And also I'm interested in thoseexperiments that are happening
all over the world. Always fill my heart with joy.
Rewilding or 100 square miles off the coast of Scotland, now 7
or 8 years old. No fishing in there, no bottom
scraping, industrial fishing either.
And biologists have been amazed at the push back of plant life,
(16:10):
marine life in those areas. And I think human culture is a
bit like that, that as well. We are quite resilient.
I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War.
I mean, somewhere between 80 and100 million people died in it,
probably the first major war in which far more civilians died
(16:33):
than soldiers. And yet, and in 1945, European
cities were in total ruin, 1215 million people displaced.
It looked like the end of the world jumped 30 years.
And it's all kind of coming backto Tokyo that was burnt to the
ground three times overs, you know, bustling again.
(16:54):
And although collective memorieskeep those wars alive, daily
life pushes on. And as one of the characters
says, you know, whether Jack gets his Jill becomes more
important day on day than whatever happened at
Thermopylae. And I imagine the past looking
(17:14):
back on the 21st century, thinking, yeah, that was really
hard in the way that we look back on the first half of the
20th, but they still just about scraped through.
That's what I find missing in science fiction.
So this is science fiction without the science, with the
history, with the humanities, and with Jack either getting is
(17:37):
Jill or Jill betraying Jack or getting a Jack.
And how much we can know about it, and even how much we can
know about each other in the present too, which is why
there's a long episode about thetragedy of Alzheimer's, not only
for the victim but for the carer, that slow loss of the
past, as it were. The memory is like a death
(18:00):
within within a living body. And I've experienced it closely
in my my own family. I think my mother died long
before she was dead. And many, many more people now
are, are experiencing this because we're living longer.
Yes, it's an extraordinary epidemic.
Yeah, I. Mean Alzheimer's aside, I mean,
(18:22):
it's it. It sounds surprisingly
optimistic and rather hopeful. Have you?
Two or three nuclear wars, Yeah,well.
Survival, human survival and and, and what is what it is to
be human? Is nuanced optimism.
Is it, Well, I mean, you know, because you're not known for
that, but this? Yeah.
(18:43):
Well, I think as you get older, there are two ways to go.
You either think the the world is coming to an end because I'm
coming to an end, or you think Iwant the project to survive
because I've got grandchildren. I mean, we've heard it many
times. I used to groan when I heard old
people say that. But.
(19:04):
I mean, as, as you say a lot, a lot of the story is about this
poet of, of now people looking back, looking back on him 100
years away. I mean, I suppose people will do
that about you, and I suppose you must be thinking about that
to some degree. I don't think about it much.
It's out of my hands and I I'm not a great believer in the
(19:27):
afterlife. I know that things will be very
much like before I was born. But you're one of the few who
has an afterlife, I think guaranteed.
And and that's not, you know, most people don't have.
That but you my idea of a properafterlife would be in, you know,
some luscious bit of countrysidefor eternity in a state of
perpetual joy with a maybe with a harp.
(19:49):
Or of course, as that famous cartoon as it people arriving in
hell were greeted with the wordsWelcome to Hell is your
accordion. I know that's very rough on
accordion players, but still, being alive in the minds of
others is not to be an afterlife, so.
(20:13):
Yes, of course. Do you?
Do you? Do you find yourself being well
wishing more that that there wasan afterlife as you get older?
Imagine living for eternity. Yeah.
The writer who wrote marvellously on this was John
Updike. Thinking of all the little
things that roll around in his mind, he's going to have to have
(20:35):
there forever, like a stupid rhyme he heard early in his
life. I'm bidding my time because
that's the kind of guy I'm, I mean, a terrible rhyme, in other
words. And he speculates he was a
believer that he's going to haveto carry this around forever.
Forever and ever. And although he could not make
(21:01):
what he called the Great Leap ofunfaith, he remained A believer.
I never could believe that he believed in an afterlife.
So no, I don't wish for it. And it's not available anyway to
be wished for. So, so, so to the disasters that
have come in in this story. I mean, how much do you fear
(21:22):
that they are real? You know that we are on the the
way to perhaps some sort of nuclear calamity I geopolitical
stride. Well, I've always been a news
junkie. I've followed it all my life.
I've always been moaning and groaning like everyone else but
the present. But I've never known it this
bad. I think the world is preparing
(21:42):
for war. I keep hearing people say,
quoting Renatus Flavius, I thinkit was who said if you want
peace, you prepare for war. Well, that's a partial truth
because if you end up with war, it's because you've prepared for
it is also true. I see the rise of autocratic
(22:06):
states pressing in and Europe's looking very frail and could be
the last remnant of the idea of an open society with its own
pressures from from the populistright.
Like many people, I'm despairingat the moment where the United
(22:28):
States is going and taking us watching those leaders, North
Korea, China, Russia and and their various followers.
Istanbul was there, Istanbul in relation to and Hungary.
(22:50):
It's not looking great, and one danger of AI is it's going to be
inserted into the preparations of launch capabilities of
nuclear weapons, and I think that's really going to be an
extraordinary matter. We will perhaps lose that
command and control and that setof voices that have to flow
(23:12):
upwards and. Well, we already may be seeing
that in Modern Warfare. There was a story, I don't know
whether it's always about Israeli targeting, of how it
finds people it suspects of being linked to Hamas and that
AI is involved in that process. Absolutely.
So warfare and AII think are, you know, to bring us back to
(23:33):
the beginning, you know, will really.
Push. Well, I mean, Trump is changing
his Department of Defence to a department.
Of war. But we had a war department for
a long time. But then we fought a lot of
wars. So I'm not much comforted by the
words of Renatus. It's, it's one of those clever
truths that run alongside its exact opposite.
(23:55):
You want to war, prepare for war.
And you know, we learnt so in all the remembrances of the
First World War in the last few years, how we no one wanted a
war and we sleepwalked into one.I don't find much trustworthy
(24:19):
reason among our leaders. I think that's the frightening
thing, an expansionist Russia. It's eleven time zones wanting
to take another country in. My biggest hope about the 21st
century is, is my most reasonable hope.
We'll scrape through and there will be disasters and
catastrophes along the way and we might disrupt ourselves so
(24:46):
much that a kind of peace will descend.
That would be it, as my academicsays to himself or to his his
lover. The only reason we're we're not
at war is we don't have any metal.
You know it's all underwater pulling up old vans and stuff to
make to meltdown for a. And human life will be much
(25:11):
harder. And we won't have.
No. Many of the things that we have.
No oranges in winter, all those things we take for granted.
Possibly no anaesthetics. My biggest dread of of having
suddenly being projected back into the 17th century would be,
you know, having appendicitis ora toothache.
(25:35):
You have to remember for example, Peeps had a bladder
stone and it was driving him nuts.
He couldn't write anymore. He got the best top Dr. in
London. So a couple of people to hold
him down shot a Brandy. Then that doctor made a very
(25:57):
quick incision in his perineum, then groped around for his
bladder with filthy hands, got the stone out, stitched up the
bladder, stitched up the perineum in 45 seconds.
That's why he was the top surgeon.
OK, so that's why I want my guy to remind us in envying us all
our blessings in the developed world, as long as you're not too
(26:21):
poor, the oranges in winter and the anaesthetics are
extraordinary blessings. We have hot water flowing out of
taps. Our excrement is washed away in
a full of a handle. Medieval kings would envious and
so will the future as. A As a writer, you know,
there's, there's obviously a massive debate around freedom of
(26:43):
speech. What is the biggest threat to
your freedom of speech? Do you think?
Is it? Is it the right or the left?
The left stuff is sort of annoying and trivial and and
it's only a portion of the left.The right stuff, I think,
because it contains elements, strong elements of racism,
xenophobia and disbelief in climate change.
(27:08):
It seems almost automatic. They all seem to go together.
That level of mistrust of science, I think is the most
dangerous element. And climate change will
eventually affect everyone's free speech that I mean, it'll,
it will really close us down. Authoritarian governments, of
(27:31):
course, will do. So big question I think for us
is, is how recoverable this is is, and I think of a Borgay
story, Garden of the forking paths and about how there are
these two paths go down. But once you're down one, it's
irrecoverable to get back down the other.
(27:52):
So is Trump just a blimp? And it leads us, leads Americans
to realise how urgent it is to reform their Constitution.
Or can they not find any way back because the Constitution is
actually so weak that it's permitted it's extraordinary
degrees of concentration of power?
(28:15):
Who knows? But at the moment it doesn't
look great, I have to say. And.
And do you think people can we can do things to prevent the
catastrophes that you fear or or, you know, are these things
beyond control, that they have alife of their own?
Well, I'd say locked down in this particular instance, the
American voter, that's somethingthey can all do.
(28:37):
They don't have a a structured opposition.
There's there's no loyal opposition in the States this
and where are the Democrats? They're all over the place.
So maybe that's the first thing they've got to fix.
Look back at our 1688 and say we're going to have some rules
(29:00):
to rein in the power of the monarch.
So, Ian McEwan, thank you very much indeed.
I've never known it this bad. I think the world is preparing
for war. I'm despairing at the moment of
where the United States is goingand taking us.
Do you think that we can do things to prevent the
catastrophes that you fear? My biggest hope about the 21st
century is, is my most reasonable hope.
We'll scrape through, and there will be disasters and
(00:20):
catastrophes along the way, and we might disrupt ourselves so
much that a kind of peace will be sent.
There's obviously a massive debate around freedom of speech.
What is the biggest threat to your freedom of speech, do you
think? Is it?
Is it the right or the left? Hello and welcome to Ways to
(00:43):
Change the World. I'm Christian Girimurphy, and
this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people
about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have
helped shape them. Today's guest is a writer who,
if not changing the whole world,certainly helped change the
British novel. As one of a group of writers in
the 80s who began experimenting with style and subject, Ian
(01:03):
Mcewan's latest novel, What We Can Know, asks profound
questions about who we are and where we're going.
Set in a future where the lowlands of the UK have been
submerged by rising seas, we arenow just an archipelago.
So, Ian McEwen, thank you for joining us.
If you could change the world inany way, how would you change
(01:23):
it? What I would love is a
development that we can make some kind of peace for this
thing that's coming down the track towards us, which is AI,
artificial intelligence. We can't make it go away.
We're going to have to live withit.
It's going to infiltrate our lives on both the large scale
(01:43):
and the personal scale. And what I would hope it would
do, and what I hope we can do something about it ourselves
individually, is see how it might help redefine ourselves as
as humans and how this thing canremain a wonderful tool at our
(02:04):
disposal. And I think it takes some
exercise of mind for all of us as users.
I heard for the first time how you can just read a write out a
poem to an AI music software andask it to set it as if sung by
Frank Sinatra with a full orchestra.
(02:26):
It was the first time I got really anxious to be quite
honest, because in in a minute we had a perfectly orchestrated
7 chord songs, sophisticated piano introduction, brass, mass
strings, harmonies. How are we going to live with
that and how it will push us back onto a reckoning of what's
(02:48):
essential about us that no, no machine could crowd out?
Have you have you tried asking ChatGPT to write in the style of
Ian McEwan? I think one of my children did.
It was, you know what the outcome was?
It was shockingly mediocre. It was terrible.
But that was only that was two years ago, which is now a very
long time. Come a long way.
(03:08):
Yeah. So that little moment of
creative display was my first chill about this.
And I think there are ways in which we can both distance
ourselves, absorb it, but see itas a tool.
Otherwise, I think we're going to lose something very, very
(03:32):
rapidly. I mean, people talk about loss
of attention spans and so on. I don't believe any of that.
I think attention span is a biological matter.
We can keep those in it anyway. You get on a plane moaning about
attention spans, you're trustingyourselves to thousands of
engineers as well as a pilot. We have all that.
There has to be A to recognise we have, let's say, 100 million
(03:57):
neurons. Average connection is it's about
7000 connections to each runningon the energy of a 25 Watt light
bulb. None of these machines are
anywhere near that yet. And our connectivity within the
mind is colossal and somewhere in there we're going to be
forced into reaching for the kernel or something.
(04:20):
I'm not talking in religious terms.
These machines will never be able to touch.
And that's my optimism that we will have some core and we can
say we can pat ourselves on the back, say we've invented these
extraordinary machines. We can now do things that we
couldn't do before. It can help out with structures
of proteins or with climate change planning and so on.
(04:45):
But it's that core of our humanity.
I want it to hold up a mirror tous finally.
That it might help us actually work out what the essence of
being human is. And what we want, Yeah, what we
want. We might have more leisure.
We'd be thrown back on ourselvesin big ways if we had more
leisure. What, what do you fear about its
creativity? I mean, after all, if if AI
(05:07):
creativity is simply based on the experience of all the things
that's been fed into it, which is people and what people have
written, people like you, how isit different to another?
Understands it, even if you combing the Internet in the way
you describe, it hasn't fallen in love, it hasn't caught
cancer, it hasn't broken a leg skiing irresponsibly at the age
(05:30):
of 17 or or all the things that cumulatively make us.
It doesn't know what it is to beasked and there's a vast gap.
It can simulate it. Alan Turing way back said on on
in relation to The Imitation Game.
If you can't tell if something is conscious, then you may as
(05:51):
well treat it as if it were. We ourselves don't have the
absolute proof that each other are conscious, but we we rub
along, we have done for a long time on the assumption that each
other are conscious. So there's a gap I think, and
it's going to take more than just two years to leap across.
(06:13):
And it might never be leapt across.
I. Mean when you saw that thing I
think it was based on SUNO this artificial intelligence music
app creating instant songs yeah,which I think a lot of people
found very scary because it was surprisingly good and you and
you might similarly say well it it lacked something but it but
(06:33):
it was pretty close it was. Surprisingly good.
Or or you could put it another way round it.
It was surprisingly ordinary. Yeah.
It was just like a lot of pop music.
Yeah. And of course, you know, Tin Pan
Alley onwards could turn out music, the three chord songs and
the middle 8. And, you know, it was almost
(06:53):
like a computer they were working towards within a kind of
tradition of, of, of an easy sound.
And a lot of pop music that I hear because I'm no longer 16
and it doesn't thrill me the waythe pop music of my generation
did. It sounds totally formulaic and
quite easy for son, Eva or or all the other programmes to to
(07:18):
replicate. But we we know that a lot of
young people are using AI, yeah,in their school work and their
university work. And I mean, is there a brutal
truth that because so many people.
Are ordinary, yeah. That AI can probably do what a
lot of people can do. What it can't do is what
exceptional people like you do. But but for most of us, maybe it
(07:42):
can muddle a lot. AI could also, you know, tell
the teacher who has to mark thatpile of essays what's being
culled from the Internet. So I think already that's
happening. And maybe we're asking now the
wrong kind of questions of children, asking the kinds of
things that are much more difficult to cull from the
(08:04):
Internet. So that brings me back to this
point of getting to some core, some pursuit.
The pursuit of meaning is going to be refined to the pursuit of
the core of what it means to be biological.
I know the hard arguments against that say, well, we're
all made of matter. If you take a materialist view,
your brain is made of matter, Stardust, and so is the machine.
(08:28):
Why should we privilege A biological brain against a
silicon brain or whatever material would be?
That's quite an irresistible argument to a materialist like
myself. But I think it's not the matter
itself, it's what that matter does.
And we talk about the mind, not the brain.
(08:49):
So can we ever build a machine that has fallen in love or has
stubbed it's toe in the middle of the night going to the
bathroom? I think not.
I think it's going to be very hard.
They can. Pretend.
But do do writers? I mean, writers don't always
have to have experienced what they're writing about.
(09:10):
Of course they have to have experienced emotion.
So they can project into worlds and all the sum total of their
embodiment and all their experiences make up that
richness which is the basis of of of all invention.
The other thing is we can read and hear things that were
(09:33):
devised 2700 years ago by Homer.We can sympathise with what's
going on, even though as a culture, a warrior culture, so
remote from our own that we'd belost within it if we were time
travelled. But for example, when Odysseus
comes home and Penelope, he's been waiting for him all these
(09:55):
years, doesn't even recognise him because he's a shaggy
bearded guy. And then he gets a little upset
and they have a little tiff and then she puts him to the test.
How was the wedding bed made? And he's able to tell her, but
the but the little marital tiff is not quite over.
So we can read that and understand it and feel it.
(10:19):
There's some core that runs between a Desus time and our own
through hues, manifestations anditerations.
And it's that that I think we'renow going to be in pursuit of
that. It will push us, helplessly I
think, possibly into a pursuit of that thing.
(10:41):
I mean, isn't, isn't it better that we don't find it?
Because if we find it, you will then it can be replicated well.
No. The thing I'm, the thing I'm
dreaming of finding is, is irreplaceable.
Possibly, yes, someone hearing me in 300 years time or even 50
years time, we'll think what a hopeless pursuit that was
(11:02):
because we can imitate anything.But that's The Imitation Game.
That's the imitation. That's not the thing itself.
I mean, that brings us to the book, the new book, because,
because what it identifies very,very early on is we're now in an
age where everything is digital.Everything is there for scholars
theoretically in 100 years or 200 years to look at, to work
(11:25):
out exactly what you were doing,what you were saying, you, who
you were messaging, what you were thinking at the time, which
is very, very different to wherewe are now in terms of how we
look at the past. Yes, Shakespeare is always a
good, good point of reference here.
What we know Shakespeare is every other brush he had with
authority. There are hundreds of books,
(11:48):
thousands of books speculating about his life.
We know nothing of his everyday existence, we know what happened
when he had brushes with authority, buying tons of grain
during the famine in Warwickshire and so on.
(12:09):
The future is going to be absolutely buried in detail.
As long as supply chains exist and the Internet carries on.
Every last e-mail, text, social media, interviews given by
authors, it will be vast. Will it carry enough information
(12:32):
for us? Because emails are curiously
light on information. I'm on the train kind of thing.
When we read the letters of Darwin or Napoleon, they're
intensely reflective. They're all punctuated capital
letters. No, no shortage of full stops
(12:53):
and colons. We get more in some sense and
less in another sense. So possibly it swings and rounds
about. But I'm interested in
speculating about the state of the humanities, history,
aesthetics, literature in an agein which we've managed to scrape
(13:16):
through the next 100 years. We haven't had an all out
nuclear exchange. There have been catastrophes, no
question about it, limited so-called nuclear exchanges.
Britain. Britain doesn't exist as it does
now. Britain is a very well, I mean
the rising water, I mean, I wanted 85 metres and you can't
get that out of climate change. We're we're looking at 70
(13:37):
centimetres, maybe a whole metre.
If things go really badly, that'll be disastrous enough.
But so I have a Russian nuclear weapon, a very big one, fall
short of southwest United Statesand falls into the Mid-Atlantic.
And there's a colossal set of tsunamis that invade western
(13:59):
Africa, Europe, and the eastern seaboard of the United States.
But it seemed quite conceivable because our times are so
interesting. The supply chains have been
disrupted, industrial civilisation is under some kind
of meltdown and Britain is a rather sleepy set of
(14:21):
archipelagos and Scotland is a rather dangerous place to go.
And yet we scrape by. We were still we still have our
universities and the humanities departments are rather seedy
compared to the the. Oxford and Cambridge seem to be
underwater and they're underwater.
We're now with the University ofthe South Downs.
The University of South Downs, so a nice long, 40 mile Long
(14:42):
Island. An academic whose main interest
is to look at our time. He's interested in a particular
poet, very famous poet, Francis Blundy.
I wanted to come out of speculation in the future from
the point of view of someone whoreally envied us, who envied our
(15:02):
literature, who still thought there was so much in our nature,
I mean our living environment, that he would adore to have
partaken in. He saw us at the point in which
it could have gone either way. It went a bad way, but not so
bad as people thought. There wasn't the total nuclear
(15:23):
meltdown that we used to dread about and right about in the 70s
and 80s, but disparate wars never lasting too long.
Also putting a great deal of dust in the air and global
temperatures. Drop one or two points, get
another crack at climate change.Highly nuanced optimism.
(15:45):
And also I'm interested in thoseexperiments that are happening
all over the world. Always fill my heart with joy.
Rewilding or 100 square miles off the coast of Scotland, now 7
or 8 years old. No fishing in there, no bottom
scraping, industrial fishing either.
And biologists have been amazed at the push back of plant life,
(16:10):
marine life in those areas. And I think human culture is a
bit like that, that as well. We are quite resilient.
I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War.
I mean, somewhere between 80 and100 million people died in it,
probably the first major war in which far more civilians died
(16:33):
than soldiers. And yet, and in 1945, European
cities were in total ruin, 1215 million people displaced.
It looked like the end of the world jumped 30 years.
And it's all kind of coming backto Tokyo that was burnt to the
ground three times overs, you know, bustling again.
(16:54):
And although collective memorieskeep those wars alive, daily
life pushes on. And as one of the characters
says, you know, whether Jack gets his Jill becomes more
important day on day than whatever happened at
Thermopylae. And I imagine the past looking
(17:14):
back on the 21st century, thinking, yeah, that was really
hard in the way that we look back on the first half of the
20th, but they still just about scraped through.
That's what I find missing in science fiction.
So this is science fiction without the science, with the
history, with the humanities, and with Jack either getting is
(17:37):
Jill or Jill betraying Jack or getting a Jack.
And how much we can know about it, and even how much we can
know about each other in the present too, which is why
there's a long episode about thetragedy of Alzheimer's, not only
for the victim but for the carer, that slow loss of the
past, as it were. The memory is like a death
(18:00):
within within a living body. And I've experienced it closely
in my my own family. I think my mother died long
before she was dead. And many, many more people now
are, are experiencing this because we're living longer.
Yes, it's an extraordinary epidemic.
Yeah, I. Mean Alzheimer's aside, I mean,
(18:22):
it's it. It sounds surprisingly
optimistic and rather hopeful. Have you?
Two or three nuclear wars, Yeah,well.
Survival, human survival and and, and what is what it is to
be human? Is nuanced optimism.
Is it, Well, I mean, you know, because you're not known for
that, but this? Yeah.
(18:43):
Well, I think as you get older, there are two ways to go.
You either think the the world is coming to an end because I'm
coming to an end, or you think Iwant the project to survive
because I've got grandchildren. I mean, we've heard it many
times. I used to groan when I heard old
people say that. But.
(19:04):
I mean, as, as you say a lot, a lot of the story is about this
poet of, of now people looking back, looking back on him 100
years away. I mean, I suppose people will do
that about you, and I suppose you must be thinking about that
to some degree. I don't think about it much.
It's out of my hands and I I'm not a great believer in the
(19:27):
afterlife. I know that things will be very
much like before I was born. But you're one of the few who
has an afterlife, I think guaranteed.
And and that's not, you know, most people don't have.
That but you my idea of a properafterlife would be in, you know,
some luscious bit of countrysidefor eternity in a state of
perpetual joy with a maybe with a harp.
(19:49):
Or of course, as that famous cartoon as it people arriving in
hell were greeted with the wordsWelcome to Hell is your
accordion. I know that's very rough on
accordion players, but still, being alive in the minds of
others is not to be an afterlife, so.
(20:13):
Yes, of course. Do you?
Do you? Do you find yourself being well
wishing more that that there wasan afterlife as you get older?
Imagine living for eternity. Yeah.
The writer who wrote marvellously on this was John
Updike. Thinking of all the little
things that roll around in his mind, he's going to have to have
(20:35):
there forever, like a stupid rhyme he heard early in his
life. I'm bidding my time because
that's the kind of guy I'm, I mean, a terrible rhyme, in other
words. And he speculates he was a
believer that he's going to haveto carry this around forever.
Forever and ever. And although he could not make
(21:01):
what he called the Great Leap ofunfaith, he remained A believer.
I never could believe that he believed in an afterlife.
So no, I don't wish for it. And it's not available anyway to
be wished for. So, so, so to the disasters that
have come in in this story. I mean, how much do you fear
(21:22):
that they are real? You know that we are on the the
way to perhaps some sort of nuclear calamity I geopolitical
stride. Well, I've always been a news
junkie. I've followed it all my life.
I've always been moaning and groaning like everyone else but
the present. But I've never known it this
bad. I think the world is preparing
(21:42):
for war. I keep hearing people say,
quoting Renatus Flavius, I thinkit was who said if you want
peace, you prepare for war. Well, that's a partial truth
because if you end up with war, it's because you've prepared for
it is also true. I see the rise of autocratic
(22:06):
states pressing in and Europe's looking very frail and could be
the last remnant of the idea of an open society with its own
pressures from from the populistright.
Like many people, I'm despairingat the moment where the United
(22:28):
States is going and taking us watching those leaders, North
Korea, China, Russia and and their various followers.
Istanbul was there, Istanbul in relation to and Hungary.
(22:50):
It's not looking great, and one danger of AI is it's going to be
inserted into the preparations of launch capabilities of
nuclear weapons, and I think that's really going to be an
extraordinary matter. We will perhaps lose that
command and control and that setof voices that have to flow
(23:12):
upwards and. Well, we already may be seeing
that in Modern Warfare. There was a story, I don't know
whether it's always about Israeli targeting, of how it
finds people it suspects of being linked to Hamas and that
AI is involved in that process. Absolutely.
So warfare and AII think are, you know, to bring us back to
(23:33):
the beginning, you know, will really.
Push. Well, I mean, Trump is changing
his Department of Defence to a department.
Of war. But we had a war department for
a long time. But then we fought a lot of
wars. So I'm not much comforted by the
words of Renatus. It's, it's one of those clever
truths that run alongside its exact opposite.
(23:55):
You want to war, prepare for war.
And you know, we learnt so in all the remembrances of the
First World War in the last few years, how we no one wanted a
war and we sleepwalked into one.I don't find much trustworthy
(24:19):
reason among our leaders. I think that's the frightening
thing, an expansionist Russia. It's eleven time zones wanting
to take another country in. My biggest hope about the 21st
century is, is my most reasonable hope.
We'll scrape through and there will be disasters and
catastrophes along the way and we might disrupt ourselves so
(24:46):
much that a kind of peace will descend.
That would be it, as my academicsays to himself or to his his
lover. The only reason we're we're not
at war is we don't have any metal.
You know it's all underwater pulling up old vans and stuff to
make to meltdown for a. And human life will be much
(25:11):
harder. And we won't have.
No. Many of the things that we have.
No oranges in winter, all those things we take for granted.
Possibly no anaesthetics. My biggest dread of of having
suddenly being projected back into the 17th century would be,
you know, having appendicitis ora toothache.
(25:35):
You have to remember for example, Peeps had a bladder
stone and it was driving him nuts.
He couldn't write anymore. He got the best top Dr. in
London. So a couple of people to hold
him down shot a Brandy. Then that doctor made a very
(25:57):
quick incision in his perineum, then groped around for his
bladder with filthy hands, got the stone out, stitched up the
bladder, stitched up the perineum in 45 seconds.
That's why he was the top surgeon.
OK, so that's why I want my guy to remind us in envying us all
our blessings in the developed world, as long as you're not too
(26:21):
poor, the oranges in winter and the anaesthetics are
extraordinary blessings. We have hot water flowing out of
taps. Our excrement is washed away in
a full of a handle. Medieval kings would envious and
so will the future as. A As a writer, you know,
there's, there's obviously a massive debate around freedom of
(26:43):
speech. What is the biggest threat to
your freedom of speech? Do you think?
Is it? Is it the right or the left?
The left stuff is sort of annoying and trivial and and
it's only a portion of the left.The right stuff, I think,
because it contains elements, strong elements of racism,
xenophobia and disbelief in climate change.
(27:08):
It seems almost automatic. They all seem to go together.
That level of mistrust of science, I think is the most
dangerous element. And climate change will
eventually affect everyone's free speech that I mean, it'll,
it will really close us down. Authoritarian governments, of
(27:31):
course, will do. So big question I think for us
is, is how recoverable this is is, and I think of a Borgay
story, Garden of the forking paths and about how there are
these two paths go down. But once you're down one, it's
irrecoverable to get back down the other.
(27:52):
So is Trump just a blimp? And it leads us, leads Americans
to realise how urgent it is to reform their Constitution.
Or can they not find any way back because the Constitution is
actually so weak that it's permitted it's extraordinary
degrees of concentration of power?
(28:15):
Who knows? But at the moment it doesn't
look great, I have to say. And.
And do you think people can we can do things to prevent the
catastrophes that you fear or or, you know, are these things
beyond control, that they have alife of their own?
Well, I'd say locked down in this particular instance, the
American voter, that's somethingthey can all do.
(28:37):
They don't have a a structured opposition.
There's there's no loyal opposition in the States this
and where are the Democrats? They're all over the place.
So maybe that's the first thing they've got to fix.
Look back at our 1688 and say we're going to have some rules
(29:00):
to rein in the power of the monarch.
So, Ian McEwan, thank you very much indeed.
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