In his talk yesterday at COSM 2021, venture capitalist and philanthropist Peter Thiel -- the ultimate Silicon Valley insider, prophet, and sometimes needed gadfly -- offered a cold shower for transhumanism, The Singularity, the computers we will supposedly merge with by 2030, and all that. Those things, he thinks, are uncertain. We should worry about what's happening now in everyday time, to which, in his view, too few are paying heed: The growth of total AI-based surveillance and the disappearance of privacy. Thiel considers arguments about whether computers that think like people will ever be developed to be "above his pay grade." Given that he is reputed to be worth $3.7B dollars, that's a polite way of saying that such arguments are a pleasant waste of time.

At first glance, Demis Hassabis is an unusual figure for Dominic Cummings to have turned to for guidance in March 2020 about the threat of the novel coronavirus bearing down on the UK. The co-founder of Google subsidiary DeepMind, which is dedicated to high-level AI research, has a varied CV, but is no epidemiologist. A child chess prodigy, he hit the rank of master at 13 and was for a brief time the second-highest-rated player in the world in his age category. After completing his A-levels two years early, he joined video game studio Bullfrog, where he co-designed the hit classic Theme Park at just 17 years old, before leaving to study computer science at Cambridge. He returned to video game development for another decade, and, after switching back to academia and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, founded DeepMind in 2011. In the decade since, during which DeepMind was sold to Google for £400m, the company has worked on a number of healthcare problems.

On March 9, 2017, ZT, an underground technologist and writer, read his upcoming novella: Architects of the Apocalypse, to a group of his adherents in the basement of an abandoned bar in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion was the Third Annual Meltdown Congress--an underground, invitation-only organization dedicated to the survival of the human species in the face of near certain digital annihilation. I was present, along with three of my compatriots, plus about 30 gray hat hackers (hackers or cybersecurity experts without malicious intent) who represent the cream of the American hacking community. It chronicles an age in which artificial intelligence and its adjutant automata run the world--in which humanity is free and is cared for entirely by the automata. The artificial intelligence in this novella has organized itself along hierarchical lines, and the ultimate decision-making function is called "The Recursive Decider."

On March 9, 2017, ZT, an underground technologist and writer, read his upcoming novella: Architects of the Apocalypse, to a group of his adherents in the basement of an abandoned bar in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion was the Third Annual Meltdown Congress--an underground, invitation-only organization dedicated to the survival of the human species in the face of near certain digital annihilation. I was present, along with three of my compatriots, plus about 30 gray hat hackers (hackers or cybersecurity experts without malicious intent) who represent the cream of the American hacking community. It chronicles an age in which artificial intelligence and its adjutant automata run the world--in which humanity is free and is cared for entirely by the automata. The artificial intelligence in this novella has organized itself along hierarchical lines, and the ultimate decision-making function is called "The Recursive Decider."

On March 9, 2017, ZT, an underground technologist and writer, read his upcoming novella: Architects of the Apocalypse, to a group of his adherents in the basement of an abandoned bar in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion was the Third Annual Meltdown Congress -- an underground, invitation-only organization dedicated to the survival of the human species in the face of near certain digital annihilation. I was present, along with three of my compatriots, plus about 30 gray hat hackers (hackers or cybersecurity experts without malicious intent) who represent the cream of the American hacking community. It chronicles an age in which artificial intelligence and its adjutant automata run the world -- in which humanity is free and is cared for entirely by the automata. The artificial intelligence in this novella has organized itself along hierarchical lines, and the ultimate decision-making function is called "The Recursive Decider."

On March 9, 2017, ZT, an underground technologist and writer, read his upcoming novella: Architects of the Apocalypse, to a group of his adherents in the basement of an abandoned bar in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion was the Third Annual Meltdown Congress--an underground, invitation-only organization dedicated to the survival of the human species in the face of near certain digital annihilation. I was present, along with three of my compatriots, plus about 30 gray hat hackers (hackers or cybersecurity experts without malicious intent) who represent the cream of the American hacking community. It chronicles an age in which artificial intelligence and its adjutant automata run the world--in which humanity is free and is cared for entirely by the automata. The artificial intelligence in this novella has organized itself along hierarchical lines, and the ultimate decision-making function is called "The Recursive Decider."

On March 9, 2017, ZT, an underground technologist and writer, read his upcoming novella: Architects of the Apocalypse, to a group of his adherents in the basement of an abandoned bar in Nashville, Tennessee. The occasion was the Third Annual Meltdown Congress--an underground, invitation-only organization dedicated to the survival of the human species in the face of near certain digital annihilation. I was present, along with three of my compatriots, plus about 30 gray hat hackers (hackers or cybersecurity experts without malicious intent) who represent the cream of the American hacking community. It chronicles an age in which artificial intelligence and its adjutant automata run the world--in which humanity is free and is cared for entirely by the automata. The artificial intelligence in this novella has organized itself along hierarchical lines, and the ultimate decision-making function is called "The Recursive Decider."

In the presentation below, Dr. Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind delivered a talk on "General Learning Algorithms" to the Royal Society in London on May 22, 2015. Hassabis is a neuroscientist and leading expert on the neural basis of memory and imagination. He was the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company, bought by Google in Jan 2014. He is now Vice President of Engineering at Google DeepMind and leads Google's general AI efforts. Demis is a former child chess prodigy, who finished his A-levels two years early before coding the multi-million selling simulation game Theme Park aged 17.