Stephen Fry has issued a stark* warning to prepare for the Internet of the future, or face the worst of science fiction’s predictions.

The actor and comedian was giving a lecture at the Hay Festival in Powys, in Britain when he made the claims.

Fry criticized the “technophobes*,” including politicians, who he said had been too slow to react to developments like artificial intelligence*.

The annual literary event began on Thursday with increased security.

Fry was delivering one of the festival’s reformations lectures — one of a series of special lectures inspired by the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s protestant reformation.

“Whether it is winter that is coming, or a new spring, it is entirely in our hands so long as we prepare,” he told the crowd in Hay-on-Wye.

“While it’s hard to calculate the cascade upon cascade of new developments and their positive effects, we already know the dire* consequences* and frightening scenarios that threaten to engulf* us,” he said.

Science fiction writers and dystopians* have already laid out the “nightmare” consequences, he added.

Fry went on to say a “great transformation in human society” was under way, greater than both the printing press and industrial revolutions.

It was “the greatest change to our way of living since we moved from hunting and gathering to settling down in farms, villages and sea ports and started to trade and form civilizations”, he added.

“Whether it will alter the behavior, cognition* and identity of the individual in the same way that it is certain to alter* the behavior, cognition and identity of the group, is a hard question to answer.

“But believe me when I say that it is happening. To be frank, it has happened.” (SD-Agencies)