3 Interview with James Barrat

Introduction

James Rodman Barrat is an American documentary filmmaker, speaker, and author of the nonfiction book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. He now writes, directs, and produces documentary film.[2] Broadcasters have included the National Geographic Channel, PBS NOVA, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Animal Planet, the Travel Channel, and The Learning Channel. Barrat has created dozens of documentaries and worked in over 70 countries. In 2014, Time magazine identified Barrat as one of the “5 Very Smart People Who Think Artificial Intelligence Could Bring the Apocalypse”. Barrat’s book was named one of eight “Definitive Tech Books of 2013” by The Huffington Post. We interview Barrat on the future of AI, the threats and dangers AI can post in the nearby future. Below is our interview with him.

Question: Thanks a lot for interviewing with us. My first question is how making a documentary like Rise of the Black Pharaohs and writing a book Our Final Invention are two different experiences. What are the challenges one encounters the two different works?

James: Well, I think first of all both of them rewards curiosity. If you’re a curious person they’re both really good fields to get into. I have been doing documentaries longer than I have been doing books but what you do with documentaries is you take a complicated subject like for example in The Rise of the Black Pharaohs and then you talk to all the experts.

And then you translate that subject for people who don’t have the technical background, you translate that subject for your viewers. So, you’re compelled to write simply and clearly and you really have to do your homework. Because in order to write simply and clearly, you have to know the subject pretty well. I’m working on a documentary which deals with suicide, which might sound like a dark subject but there are a lot of aspects to it, where there are treatments and solutions to it. Making documentaries really helped me because it taught me how to interview people about complicated subjects. For example, with my book Our Final Invention, which is about Artificial Intelligence, I wrote the book in a simple