The greatest threat to humanity is not artificial intelligence, it's the same one it has always been - authentic stupidity, British comedian Ben Elton says.
Authentic Stupidity is the title of his new stand-up show he's bringing to New Zealand in April and May.
The comedian, actor, author, playwright, lyricist and director first broke through as part of the alternative comedy scene in the UK in the early 1980s writing on hit TV shows The Young Ones and Blackadder.
Stand-up, he told RNZ's Saturday Morning, remains for him "a really pure art form."
"I mean, that might sound pompous, but I've always felt that it's a great medium for the expression of ideas, which is what I've always been driven to do," he says.
"I base the majority of my writing on kind of how I feel about people, how I feel about myself, how I feel about the world. I mean, it's not polemical, but I don't do in-depth psycho dramas about being sad. I tend to talk more generally about life, I guess - and some politics."
His Authentic Stupidity tour has been playing to packed houses in the UK, and explores familiar Elton territory.
"Essentially, what I'm doing is interrogating the essential absurdity of being alive, of humanity, of who we are, who we think we are, how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves, how we treat our planet.
"I've always mined human territory, starting with myself, and in the long run, people are stupid. Look at who we elect, look at what we're doing on our planet. We're homohalfwit."
One such authentic stupidity is allowing the ownership of society-busting tech like AI to be in so few hands, he said.
"I mean, how stupid are we to allow a bunch of unelected, unaccountable, tax-avoiding billionaires floating in their yachts off Malibu, or blasting up into space in their great big, privatised man dildos, to invent a machine which they admit themselves, will probably put us all out of work."
While the world is in a "parlous state", he remains at heart an optimist.
"I have to be. I've got children. My daughter, when I'm moaning about smartphones, says, 'Oh, shut up, dad, we've got to live with it, you're so depressing'.
"She says, 'it's all right for you, you'll be dead soon'."
Elton returned to stand-up after a 15-year break in 2019 and was nervous, he said, that his audience had drifted away.
"I wondered whether anybody [would] want to come and see an old git like me.
"And it turned out a bunch of old gits wanted to come and see - my audience has aged along with me."
Authentic Stupidity plays at: the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, on 26 April; the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Auckland, on 28 April; and at the Christchurch Town Hall on 2 May.
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