Today’s day and age is pretty messy. As technology develops exponentially and more and more things are becoming intangible to the majority of humans, I feel as if my soul is being sucked into a black hole and I’m just about to pass the event horizon (maybe I’ve already gone beyond it). With the development of AI chatbots and social media, I constantly have to remind myself to think and build opinions about the world, which is, after all, what makes us human.
In an age where information is as democratized as ever, I paradoxically find it much harder to think and learn. And I believe it’s this effect of technology that will outweigh any short-term efficiency advancement AI programs will give to corporations or how AI turns the job market upside down, because it’s the critical thinking that we’re losing.
But there is still hope.
Yesterday, I listened to a podcast by Cleo Abram called “Huge Conversations” where she interviewed Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google Deepmind. In all my years of listening to podcasts from listening to CBC radio on those car rides to and from elementary school all the way till now where I sporadically find interesting conversations on Youtube, this interview with Hassabis really struck a chord with me, it felt like finding an air pocket while trapped in an underwater cave. Hassabis stands out from other powerful tech billionaires in his underlying philosophy for technology, which is that it should be developed for the immediate betterment of human health and quality of life. I can’t believe this is a surprising, rare stance now, because as much as Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman want to hail their products as connecting the world in new and innovative ways, they don’t really know the future they’re building, or at least they haven’t convinced me that they have a clear vision for the future. It’s all quite gimmicky.
Cleo Abram asks Hassabis about many of his projects with Google Deepmind, but she focuses on AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino-acid chains. Beyond how revolutionary this technology is for medical and biological research, Demis Hassabis made the database of all protein structures completely free and open source for all scientists on Earth. This is also due to how Google gives enough autonomy to Hassabis’s team to do scientific research. Hassabis and Google Deepmind have developed various other tools, like WeatherNext, which predicts natural disasters, or MuJoCo, a widely used physics engine.
This is really really refreshing, even though it shouldn’t be. Just last week, I visited Meta Headquarters at Menlo Park to see a family friend who works there. He took my mom and I on a tour of the entire facility, and he would stop by these display stations/picture booths that show off Meta’s forefront projects, and while introducing these projects, he would emphasize Meta’s identity as “hackers.” I remember we stopped at a station for Threads. Our family friend would proudly boast “Threads was only created a couple years ago in response to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Now, we have surpassed Twitter/X.com.” Then he had me take a picture on a throne decorated with Instagram logos and colors, suspended on a cloud with a pink-sky backdrop. Further into the tour, I tried on the Meta AR and VR headsets, which gave me a headache.
“Hacker” really fits the culture of Meta, because they’re always reacting to the technological landscape and trying to “hack” their way to be competitive by hiring huge talent like Alexandr Wang to quickly build projects. They then build a lot of hype around their products, even though I can never really figure out what they’re for. I never understood the “Metaverse” and what Meta is trying to build. All I know is that they’ve created an addictive high-machine called Instagram that has rotted all my brain cells, and they sell all of my data to advertisers on Facebook. Again, it all feels very gimmicky. They paint a mirage where I’m sitting on a pink and purple throne on fluffy white clouds, smiling blissfully in ignorance, swimming in money.
Back to reality. Back to hope.
At the end of the interview, Cleo Abram asks Hassabis what his “sci-fi” future looks like as time plays out. What Hassabis said in response truly encompasses what humanity should really be about.
Hassabis: “We’ve got through the AGI moment safely. It’s built (…) we’ve used it to crack some of these what I call root node problems in science (…) which if you cracked it, it would unlock a whole branch of new research or new applications (…) I think though there will be a solution to the energy problem. So free pretty much free renewable clean energy [which] will [allow] us to really travel the stars [and]
be able to get a lot more resources because we can mine asteroids. All of these things the purview of science fiction become I think very plausible in the next 50 years (…) and then that should hopefully lead to you know maximum human flourishing and we help um cure all these terrible diseases so we live much longer healthier lives and traveling to the stars bringing consciousness to the rest of the galaxy.
Cleo: “I believe you! I truly do.”
To think that all these things can very plausibly happen within the next 50 years is astonishing, and amazing, and I am entering the workforce right at the beginning of those 50 years. Even though I’m operating in a generation of huge political and social turmoil, Cleo Abram’s interview with Hassabis has given me immense hope. There are still amazing people doing amazing things on the planet, and I will be building this new frontier with them.