Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, sure. It’s unclear how much is fiction, how much is reality. But I think the central figure that is John von Neumann, I would say it’s a haunting and beautiful exploration of madness and genius and let’s say the double-edged sword of discovery. And for people who don’t know, John von Neumann is a legendary mind. He contributed to quantum mechanics. He was on the Manhattan Project. He is widely considered to be the father of or pioneer the modern computer and AI and so on. So many people say he’s one of the smartest humans ever, which is fascinating. And what’s also fascinating is he’s a person who saw nuclear science and physics become the atomic bomb, so you got to see ideas become a thing that has a huge amount of impact on the world. He also foresaw the same thing for computing, and that’s a little bit again, beautiful and haunting aspect of the book. Then taking a leap forward and looking at this, at least it all AlphaZero, AlphaGo AlphaZero big moment that maybe John von Neumann’s thinking was brought to reality. So I guess the question is what do you think if you got to hang out with John von Neumann now, what would he say about what’s going on? Well, that would be an amazing experience. He’s a fantastic mind. And I also love the way he spent a lot of his time at Princeton at the Institute of Advanced Studies, a very special place for thinking. And it’s amazing how much of a polymath he was and the spread of things he helped invent, including of course the Von Neumann architecture that all the modern computers are based on. And he had amazing foresight. I think he would’ve loved where we are today, and I think he would’ve really enjoyed AlphaGo being, he did game theory. I think he foresaw a lot of what would happen with learning machines, systems that are grown, I think he called it rather than programmed. I’m not sure how even maybe he wouldn’t even be that surprised. There’s the fruition of what I think he already foresaw in the 1950s. I wonder what advice he would give. He got to see the building of the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project. I’m sure there’s interesting stuff that maybe is not talked about enough, maybe some bureaucratic aspect, maybe the influence of politicians, maybe not enough of picking up the phone and talking to people that are called enemies by the said politicians. There might be some deep wisdom that we just may have lost from that time actually.…

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