We know that AI accelerates change in our social world. But what if the machines themselves begin to win Nobel Prizes in pure science?

It’s easy to become fixated on the day-to-day and week-to-week in the midst of this pandemic - we have to pragmatically respond to the latest fluctuation in infection rates, spread and even theory.

We’ve always wanted to keep our sensibility open to the wondrous capabilities of something like artificial intelligence - liberating us from routine mental labour in a new era of creativity. Currently AI is being harnessed to brute epidemiological calculations, not to mention massive surveillance of the population.

This site has often urged vigilance around how tech innovation often smuggles in with it new social and ethical norms. We see no reason to relax that as Covid deploys big tech to intimately manage the health of entire populations.

But we’re going to allow ourselves a small bit of tech utopianism this week, by sharing with you the futurist Azeem Azhar’s podcast interview with Google/Deep Mind’s founder Demis Hassabis.

The interview focusses on Hassabis’s long term ambition for his software - way beyond crushing human games players - which is that it can begin to accelerate the pace of primary scientific discovery: the kind that wins Nobel Prizes, and creates new paradigms and schools of thought.

Click on the image below to go to the podcast - and below that are some further reading references:

“How GPT-3 Is Shaping Our AI Future” (Exponential View podcast, 2020)
“Inside DeepMind’s epic mission to solve science’s trickiest problem” (Wired, 2019)
“Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try?” (MIT Technology Review, 2020)