Google DeepMind’s boss on AI, power, God and what’s next | The Economist

to do, boss notwithstanding, you personally would have the power not we should be worried about AI, should we be worried about you? Well, I mean, people, I think, have to make their own decisions about the lab leaders, right? There's a lot of information out there now about each of the leaders. I think it's quite clear the different approaches. I think you need to, you know, also think about people's motivations, why and why they got into AI, why are they trying to build this technology? for me you know it's it's from the very beginning why I spent my whole career my whole life really working on AGI towards AGI lost 16 years at deep mind but even before that is uh to use it as the ultimate tool for science you know I just want to understand what's going on here in in in the universe and the big questions that um you know I was fascinated by as a kid when studying physics um and I think AI is my expression of like okay that's the way I think humanity can um advance our understanding of the world and then apply it to really important areas like medicine uh and energy and the environment. I was reading a new biography of you which I should disclose was written by Sebastian Malibby the husband of our editor-inchief and in that I was struck by your spiritual almost religious description of your motivations here. You told them that building AI will help you understand the universe and your place in it. You were raised a Baptist. How has that how has religion played into your view of AI? Well, actually, I mean, in my home, I was my mom is is is religious. She's the Baptist. My dad is a was is an atheist. So, I had both uh interesting inputs when I was young. So, I think that's probably helped me to be quite open-minded about things.