The Great Conversation: What Should We Do With Intelligence?
Hello everyone, and welcome to The Great Conversation.
For most of human history, intelligence has been one of our greatest tools for understanding the world.
We used it to develop mathematics, medicine, philosophy, physics, and technologies capable of seeing farther into space and deeper into matter.
But now humanity is attempting something different.
We are building tools that may extend intelligence itself.
Demis Hassabis, the London-born co-founder of DeepMind and one of the central figures in modern artificial intelligence, has spent much of his life pursuing that possibility.
His path began with chess and video games, moved through computer science and neuroscience, and eventually led to DeepMind, where systems such as AlphaGo and AlphaFold demonstrated that artificial intelligence could help solve problems once thought extraordinarily difficult.
But behind those achievements lies a larger ambition.
Hassabis has described science as something almost spiritual.
“Doing science is, sort of, like reading the mind of God,” he has said, describing the effort to understand the deepest mysteries of the universe as his own kind of religion.
That idea offers a very different way of thinking about artificial intelligence.
Much of today's conversation around AI focuses on competition.
Which company will build the most powerful model?
Which country will dominate the technology?
Which jobs will disappear?
How much money will be made?
And what happens if the technology becomes more powerful than we expect?
Those are important questions.
But Hassabis's perspective introduces another possibility.
What if the greatest purpose of artificial intelligence is not simply to automate what humans already do, but to help us understand things we currently cannot?
Consider AlphaFold.
The challenge of understanding how proteins fold had occupied scientists for decades. DeepMind used artificial intelligence to make enormous progress on that problem, opening new possibilities for biological research and medicine.
Now imagine extending that kind of capability across science.
Medicine.
Energy.
Physics.
Mathematics.
The origins of life.
Perhaps even the fundamental structure of reality itself.
In that sense, AI could become something like a new scientific instrument.
The telescope expanded our sight.
The microscope revealed worlds too small for our eyes.
Artificial intelligence may expand something different: our ability to recognize patterns and relationships hidden inside quantities of information too vast or complex for the human mind alone.
But that possibility also creates an interesting tension.
The same technology capable of accelerating scientific discovery is being developed inside corporations, national competitions, enormous financial investments, and an increasingly intense race for technological advantage.
So perhaps the future of AI will depend on more than how intelligent these systems become.
It may also depend on the ambitions we place behind that intelligence.
We can use intelligence to sell more efficiently.
To compete more aggressively.
To accumulate power.
To understand disease.
To explore the universe.
Or perhaps to ask questions we have not yet learned how to formulate.
Technology does not decide which of those purposes matters most.
We do.
Which raises a deeper question...
If humanity succeeds in creating intelligence far beyond anything we have known before, what should we ultimately ask that intelligence to help us understand?
Take a moment to reflect.
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