{"url": "http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0535c13.mp3", "page_url": "http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08qy1sl", "title": "Demis Hassabis", "show_or_channel": "Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4)", "date": "2017-05-21", "duration_s": 2180, "type": "interview", "speakers": ["Demis Hassabis", "Kirsty Young"], "confidence": "high", "notes": "Music cut down in podcast version.", "people": ["demis-hassabis"], "id": "2017-05-21_desert-island-discs-bbc-demis-hassabis", "audio_duration_s": 2180.62475, "worker": "jc-w08", "transcribe_s": 97.1, "model": "large-v3", "segments": [{"start": 0.0, "end": 20.24, "text": "This is the BBC. Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4."}, {"start": 41.71, "end": 63.97, "text": "My castaway this week is the artificial intelligence expert Demis Hassabis, although to tie him to just one subject is to rather understate his achievements. He's also a neuroscientist, computer games designer, entrepreneur and world-class chess player. So what's he currently working on? Simple, really. A potentially meta solution to any problem."}, {"start": 63.97, "end": 88.96, "text": "Given his track record, it's clear he's A, entirely serious, and B, probably up to the job. A child prodigy, he won a place at Cambridge aged 16, going on to graduate with a double first. In his 30s, he and his partners sold their artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, to Google for a reported \u00a3400 million. He says, well, a lot of interesting things, but here's a flavour."}, {"start": 88.96, "end": 118.58, "text": "Trying to build an artificial mind is, I think, the best way of investigating some of the mysteries of our own minds, like what consciousness is, what dreams are for, what creativity is. So welcome, Demis Hassabis. Dreams, creativity, consciousness, they are really at the very core of what defines humanity. It strikes me you're clearly not somebody who suffers from existential overwhelm. You like the big questions, do you?"}, {"start": 118.58, "end": 147.09, "text": "Yes, I've always been drawn to the huge questions in life, you know, the meaning of life, why we're here, what's going on in the universe. And things like physics and science and artificial intelligence are ways of exploring those mysteries. Now, this notion of this potentially meta solution to any problem, the idea is that there is a key available that will unlock all understanding. At best, that sounds unlikely, and at worst, it sounds preposterous. Put me right."}, {"start": 147.09, "end": 174.18, "text": "Well, if you think about how civilization has evolved and all the things that human society has built around us, it's all the product of intelligence. So intelligence is this kind of meta solution to everything else that as a society we might want to achieve or understand. And I've always felt, again from a young age, that computers can be this kind of magical device that can extend the power of the mind. And I think artificial intelligence is the sort of the end point of that."}, {"start": 174.18, "end": 189.07, "text": "Very intelligent people, highly intelligent people are often very unusual people. What's the most unusual thing about you? I think I probably have some quite unusual habits. I generally sleep at about four in the morning."}, {"start": 189.07, "end": 216.5, "text": "You know, I'll get into work around 10 a.m., do a full day's work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family and then start a second day's work, you know, at 10 p.m., 11 p.m. and go on to the small hours of the morning. Usually that's the time when I do my research. So I'll be reading about the latest academic papers. I like doing all of my kind of creative thinking in the small hours of the morning. And, you know, I've had a lot of habits like that that I've learned maximize the way that I think."}, {"start": 216.5, "end": 223.54, "text": "Can you give me an example of the most current exciting breakthrough in artificial intelligence?"}, {"start": 223.54, "end": 252.88, "text": "The most exciting breakthrough, I think, from our perspective, is combining two different areas of artificial intelligence together. There's one area called deep learning, which uses neural networks that kind of mimic what the brain does. So the other pathways. Yeah, all the pathways that form these big networks of pathways. And they're now got amazingly powerful. So you can do object recognition. You can do speech recognition. So, for example, this is when, you know, 30, 40 years ago, a computer would not have been able to look at a cat and say that's a cat. Exactly. Whereas now it can. Whereas now it's now a cat. Exactly."}, {"start": 252.88, "end": 276.38, "text": "from just being given a few hundred examples of what cats look like. And then the second part, reinforcement learning, which we specialize in, is about decision making. So given your model of the world out there, your experiences, you build a model of the world, how it works, and then how do you use that model to make decisions? So in a computer game, which is what we test our algorithms on, it will be getting the highest score you can get."}, {"start": 276.38, "end": 305.68, "text": "And these two systems together, which is our big innovation, gives you, in some sense, the rudimentary beginnings of a full intelligence. So in essence, we're still at the first steps of this. That's sort of the whole cycle that you need for intelligence. I don't know how much you had to dumb that down, but I actually understood it very clearly. Thank you so much. We're going to come back to the concerns, the opportunities, the worries that people have later. But for now, let's have your first piece of music then, Demis Hassabis. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear? So the film Blade Runner, obviously it's about..."}, {"start": 305.68, "end": 308.86, "text": "And it's about robotics."}, {"start": 308.86, "end": 338.16, "text": "And I just love everything about this film. And it was very formative for me when I saw it as a teenager because it sort of brought artificial intelligence to life in this really beautiful visual world, sumptuous visual world, I would say. And I love that speech that he gives at the end. He's talking about a couple of very emotive memories that he's seen that no other humans have seen because he's been travelling the stars. And he talks about those moments being lost forever, like tears in rain. I also love the Vangelis soundtrack. For me, it was one of the..."}, {"start": 338.16, "end": 400.96, "text": "You know, to think about spending my career on artificial intelligence and, you know, trying to make some of those things reality. I've seen the attack ships on fire. I watched sea beings glitter in the dark. Tears in Rain, that was Vangelis' tune from the soundtrack to the film Blade Runner. Demis Hassabis, whenever I read the things that you've said about your work into AI, you make it sound a lot more, well..."}, {"start": 400.96, "end": 428.26, "text": "Well, if you think about it, intelligence is this amazing power in the universe. You know, it's almost like a force. And I just think it's an incredible thing that..."}, {"start": 428.26, "end": 440.32, "text": "that we have these minds that can invent and create. So for me, as an engineer, trying to break that down and understand the processes and the mechanisms that are involved in that is the most fascinating thing you can work on."}, {"start": 440.32, "end": 464.42, "text": "And you think that this is all computable? You think that it is all possible to extrapolate this through numbers, I guess? Yeah, I have a very open mind about that. I mean, different great scientists have said different things about this. Roger Penrose, for example, the great mathematician, he thinks there's some quantum effects in the brain, so in which case you wouldn't be able to compute it on a classical computing device. You'd need a quantum computer. Where do you stand?"}, {"start": 464.42, "end": 494.26, "text": "The biology and the neuroscience shows that there isn't something mysterious like quantum mechanics going on in the brain. To do science properly, you always have to keep an open mind that you're going to discover something new or someone else in a related field will discover something new that changes your opinion. But for now, we're operating under the assumption that you can compute everything that's going on in the brain on a normal computer. And the very name of the company, DeepMind, of course, gives us access to this thing that can be tricky to understand, which is creativity and consciousness. Can I use the word?"}, {"start": 494.26, "end": 520.42, "text": "Hidden in those parts of the brain that until now we have no access to? Yes, I think we can say hidden or maybe emergent. So these are deep mysteries, I think, that go to the core of what makes us human. And, you know, I think we are maybe on the cusp of starting to understand what some of these things might be. Could you explain for me things that have been understood maybe even in the last year to two years that up until now we thought would be impossible?"}, {"start": 520.42, "end": 533.71, "text": "Definitely. So I think there are some theories, for example, on what dreaming is. Dreams have been a mystery for thousands of years, I think. And, you know, it turns out that dreaming may be your part of the brain called the hippocampus replaying."}, {"start": 533.71, "end": 554.48, "text": "Memories that you've had recently that are very emotional, that have been recorded in your mind, and then replaying them back at much faster rates while you're asleep. So the rest of your brain gets to learn about that event, what to do or what not to do, from hundreds of examples, even though you only experienced it once in real life. Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear?"}, {"start": 554.48, "end": 576.98, "text": "So I picked a piece by Enya called Watermark, and I picked it because it's the first CD that I ever bought. I think I was around 12, 13 years old. And later, when I was a little bit older, around 15, I taught myself how to play piano as a hobby. This was one of the first pieces I taught myself. And the thing I like about it is it sounds really beautiful, but actually technically it's quite easy to play."}, {"start": 576.98, "end": 619.7, "text": "Enya and Watermark. Demis Hassabis, your parents produced three very interesting children. Your sister is a composer and a musician."}, {"start": 619.7, "end": 648.98, "text": "Your brother is a professional poker player. And then, as we know, there is you. I mean, tell me a bit about the upbringing that produced these three fascinating kids. Yeah, my parents are very interesting, actually. I would describe them in one word probably as quite bohemian. Right. And my father was a singer-songwriter when he was young. But he did a lot of different creative jobs. And at one point they ran a toy shop and they followed their interests. And that stuck with probably all three of us. You don't have to be constricted by social norms."}, {"start": 648.98, "end": 678.19, "text": "Follow your own creative path and really deeply explore that. And it's fine to do that. In fact, that's the way you should live life. You said he ran at times a toy shop. Is it true that littering the house on occasion were toys that weren't quite complete? That's right. That actually gave me my first sort of game design practice because, yeah, we used to get all the boxes and the sets of games that had pieces missing and they couldn't sell. So I would take them. Often they would have the rules missing, so I'd just invent something. And then I would play it with my brother and sister."}, {"start": 678.19, "end": 696.21, "text": "You started playing chess by the age of four and you were competing by the age of six. And fascinatingly, it was at a tournament in, I think, Liechtenstein when you were 11 that something..."}, {"start": 696.21, "end": 721.94, "text": "Well, terribly progressive and impressive occurred to you. Yeah, so I was at this international tournament in Lichtenstein and we were in this huge hall, you know, hundreds of international chess players. And I was playing, I think at that point he was the current Danish champion. So I was there and I was 11 years old and we were into our like our 10th hour of the game. And we were in this incredibly unusual ending where I had a king and queen and he had a king, a rook, a bishop and a knight."}, {"start": 721.94, "end": 746.0, "text": "And he had the advantage, but it should have been a draw. And we spent literally four hours with him trying to outmanoeuvre me. And finally, he tried one last cheap trick, which was that he trapped my king and all I had to do was give away my queen and then it would be stalemate and it would be a draw. But I was so tired, I didn't think about giving my queen away. And so I resigned."}, {"start": 746.0, "end": 771.94, "text": "And unbelievably, on the final moment, because I thought it was inevitable I was going to be checkmated, and he just got up, stood up, and I remember this very well, and he went, why have you resigned? It's a draw. And he immediately, with a flourish, sort of showed me the drawing move. And I was thinking, later as I got older, and even at the time, I was thinking, that's a little bit harsh on an 11-year-old. He was a grown man. It just felt sort of wrong somehow. And then it made me think, the rest of that tournament, it's like..."}, {"start": 771.94, "end": 796.34, "text": "Are we wasting our minds? You know, at that level of chess, they're all fantastically smart people. What if we used that brainpower for something more useful, like solving cancer or curing some disease? Wouldn't that be a better use? You thought that at 11? Yes, I thought that. It was a really epiphany moment for me. And your father, by that point, had been taken out of school to be homeschooled so that you could concentrate on your chess."}, {"start": 796.34, "end": 823.98, "text": "Did you have a conversation at 11 with your parents and say, this is not for me? I did. They were pretty shocked because at the time I was the second highest rated chess player in the world for my age. And, you know, everyone was assuming that's what I was going to do. And certainly until then, that's been my whole life. For example, I can't even remember me doing any schoolwork because it was all chess, although computers were in the background. So, yeah, it was a big thing for me to say that at 11. More music. Now, Demis, we're going to hear your third."}, {"start": 823.98, "end": 845.01, "text": "Tell me about this. So I picked this track from the KLF from this album, The White Room. I can't really say I was a rebellious teenager, but that was about as rebellious I got as the KLF. And I just love their sort of anarchic mentality. And I just remember listening to The White Room on cassette tape sort of nonstop while I was studying for my A-level. So it was an important time for me."}, {"start": 880.05, "end": 906.14, "text": "That was the KLF featuring Tammy Wynette and Justified and Ancient. Demis Hassabis, you used your chess winnings. I imagine you'd got a treasure chest, as it were, from those. When you were a kid to buy your first PC, it was a ZX Spectrum. You were about eight? Yeah, eight years old, yeah. And you yourself have quoted the physicist Richard Feynman saying, what I cannot build, I cannot understand. So is that what propelled you to try to understand code?"}, {"start": 906.14, "end": 913.12, "text": "Yeah, and I bought some books on programming and I started programming this thing and I just realised that this was an incredible tool."}, {"start": 913.12, "end": 942.48, "text": "And I've always loved the fact that you can set your computer off late at night doing some calculation. You can go to sleep and then this tool carries on working for you and then you get up and then it's solved. And for me, that's just magical. It's almost like offloading, enhancing your own mind. And then later on, my next computer, which was a Commodore Amiga 500, I had a couple of school friends and we used to have, you know, I guess you'd call it a hacking club where we used to try and outdo each other writing."}, {"start": 942.48, "end": 969.86, "text": "Did you feel like you were in on the big secret? I did, actually. It did feel like that. There was this fascinating netherworld that almost no one knew about. So it had that element to it. You set your A-levels a couple of years early. It was double maths, physics, chemistry."}, {"start": 969.86, "end": 978.08, "text": "You were offered a place at Cambridge, but they told you you're too early to take the place, but you have the place. And you ended up in that period."}, {"start": 978.08, "end": 1001.49, "text": "Working for a computer games firm, what did you do for them? Yeah, so actually I won a sort of national competition, which was the prize was that you won a job at this company called Bullfog Productions, which at the time was run by a very famous game designer called Peter Molyneux. And one of the games that I obsessed with when I was 12, 13 was a game called Populous, which is this huge simulation game."}, {"start": 1001.49, "end": 1030.77, "text": "And they'd made that game. So I went down there the day after my A-levels and they were pretty surprised because obviously they were expecting a graduate and they couldn't even legally employ me. So I ended up being paid in cash to pay for my YMCA hostel that I was staying in. But we ended up writing some really famous games. So a game called Theme Park. I ended up being the lead programmer and co-designer of which went on to sell millions of copies. And you say you're living in a little hostel. Your parents were cool with all of that. Yeah, they didn't really know what was going on."}, {"start": 1030.77, "end": 1059.98, "text": "So by this time, it was just so alien to them. I just, you know, disappeared off to Guildford on the train. And I don't think they had any idea what I was doing. Tell me about your next piece of music, Temasis Albus. What are we going to hear? Prodigy. So yes, when I got to Cambridge, I had an amazing three years. Honestly, it was the best three years of my life because I think for me, it was like a holiday camp because I'd basically been working my whole life, you know, professional chess. I never had a summer holiday because we were always traveling around the world, which was great, but I never had a normal summer holiday. And then in my years,"}, {"start": 1059.98, "end": 1087.34, "text": "Instead of doing the normal travel around South America, you know, on a backpack trip, which I do regret not doing that, I was working literally from the day after my A-level exam to the day I got to Cambridge. So I was determined at Cambridge to have, you know, great social time, as well as learning a lot of things. And for me, The Prodigy, the album, came out in 94, and I was listening to that all the time in my room, lying on my bed with the morning light streaming in after a whole night of going out and listening to these tracks."}, {"start": 1121.97, "end": 1141.52, "text": "That was The Prodigy and Skylined. I'm delighted to hear, Dennis Assabis, that you had fun at university. I mean, even though you got a double first, you really, you partied. Yeah. Did you ever endanger the brain? I mean, that's pretty trippy music. I did, actually. So that was a good life lesson for me. So my first year at Cambridge, I really did let loose and I had..."}, {"start": 1141.52, "end": 1158.94, "text": "Amazing group of friends that are still my best friends today. You joined another computer games company after you graduated and you set up your own design studios to market your own creations. And I hate to say this, I almost blush. I have never played a computer game in my life. What am I missing?"}, {"start": 1158.94, "end": 1185.34, "text": "Well, I think computer games, the best ones, are a great microcosm of some aspect of life. I think you can learn a lot from them. You know, in business or in life, there are not many times you can practice in a safe way ideas or strategies or, you know, develop your own mind. So I find games, it's a little bit like a gym for the mind. So I've used games, board games and computer games, to train my own mind and train myself into particular directions, and I pick games that would accentuate that."}, {"start": 1185.34, "end": 1212.69, "text": "Let's talk then on that subject about something called the Mind Sports Olympiad. Now, you have won that a record five times between 1998 and 2003. And it's a sort of festival for mental games, really. We see Olympians, we see people use their bodies. And although we know we're never going to do it ourselves, we understand it. We see the strain, we see the sinews pulsing, we see the sweat. What's the sensation?"}, {"start": 1212.69, "end": 1226.0, "text": "I think it probably has a very similar feeling, I'd imagine, in the sense, OK, it's not physical, but you have this same joy of intense mastery and reveling in..."}, {"start": 1226.0, "end": 1255.31, "text": "You know, using your talents and being able to demonstrate that. And it gives you a really meta understanding about what it takes to be the best at something. And that's one of the many lessons I've taken away from my games career is that feeling and being able to assess very quickly where you measure up and what would be required to go further. Certainly in my job now, skills to have when I assess projects or people or the difficulty of something."}, {"start": 1255.31, "end": 1273.68, "text": "I have all of those things in mind. And, you know, the other thing about games is, and what I've used, I think games like poker and chess and other things is you learn a lot about yourself and how you operate in the best way. And I think all of those things are very transferable. Let's have some more music, Demis. Tell me about what we're going to hear now. We are on your fifth disc."}, {"start": 1273.68, "end": 1297.84, "text": "So I've chosen a piece by Michael Nyman, who's one of my favourite sort of modern classical composers, I guess you could call him. And this particular piece that I listened to a lot when I was programming my first big game. And really for me, Theme Park was my gateway into my professional games career. And I listened to this particular track a lot during the very creative sort of couple of months when we were sort of designing the game."}, {"start": 1334.06, "end": 1360.16, "text": "Michael Nyman with The Garden is becoming a robe room from the film The Draftsman's Contract. Demis Hassabis, by 2010, you had founded your company. You did that with your partners, Mustafa Suleiman and Shane Legg. And I need to leap forward because there's so much to fit in. But three years later, after a lot of hard work, you presented what seemed to the world this hugely significant step. You announced that the company had developed a machine."}, {"start": 1360.16, "end": 1377.15, "text": "That could become an expert gamer with, and here's the key, the instinct to score highly. You had not taught it to play the game, but you had given it the tools with which to work out for itself how to play the game. How had the team cracked it?"}, {"start": 1377.15, "end": 1406.45, "text": "Yeah, these were classic Atari games from the 70s and 80s. And all we gave the system was the pixels on the screen and then the goal to maximise the score. And everything else it learns for itself from first principles through trying out the game and experiencing the game itself. So it was learning for itself. And that was our big breakthrough, was really showing that a system like that could master something that was challenging even for a human expert. And that's what makes somebody like Stephen Hawking say AI could be the biggest event in human history, unfortunately."}, {"start": 1406.45, "end": 1417.6, "text": "Unfortunately, it may also be the last, because when we give the computers the instinct to not just think what we might be thinking, but to think ahead of us, then surely they're in control."}, {"start": 1417.6, "end": 1445.28, "text": "Well, I think there's a lot of research left to go, but we have to think about what goals we give these systems, what values we give these systems, and how we make sure that they stick to the goals that we give them. And the way I think about AI is as this amazing tool that we can use to enhance our own goals as humans. But you yourself have even been surprised. You had come up with this AlphaGo computer program."}, {"start": 1445.28, "end": 1462.8, "text": "You watched it as it beat Lee Sedol, one of the world's leading players of this ancient game. Now, just to be clear, I mean, a typical chess game would have sort of 35 possible moves. A typical Go game has how many? Has 200. And so as you watched it beat him, you were astonished at what?"}, {"start": 1462.8, "end": 1483.74, "text": "Yes, we were astonished by the capability the machine had. And our program we created, it actually came up with its own ideas and its own motifs that even stunned the Go world. But we weren't surprised that it could play Go well. We were surprised that it could create its own moves, and we were delighted by what it created within the domain of what we'd built it to do, which was to play Go."}, {"start": 1483.74, "end": 1510.21, "text": "Right, which is why you believe that there will be a benevolent intent because you will build that in. Yes, in the course of the next few decades as these systems develop, we will understand better what kind of control systems are required, how to check and interpret what these systems are doing, and I think we will solve those problems on the way to building AI. What about these programmes being developed by people who have not our best but our worst interests at heart? Yeah, I think one..."}, {"start": 1510.21, "end": 1539.54, "text": "Good thing about it at the moment is that these are incredibly tough systems to build and incredibly complicated. There's only a few hundred people in the world that can build these things. And, you know, most of them know each other as well. So we're quite a small community and I couldn't do it now on my own. You know, we have 400 people, 250 PhDs from the top places in the world coming together. And even then we're only making, you know, small progress towards this. That's one defense. The other thing is at some point, what we hope is that once we understand these systems better and understand what we..."}, {"start": 1539.54, "end": 1568.75, "text": "I can breathe out then. Demis, tell me about your next piece of music. What are we going to hear? What's this? So I've chosen a track from Queen, Who Wants to Live Forever. I think Freddie Mercury is one of the greatest vocalists of all time. And this particular track I love because it just speaks to the briefness of life and the fragility of it. And I really feel that and I've always felt that and how you've got to make the best use of your time because it's just so..."}, {"start": 1568.75, "end": 1626.13, "text": "That was Queen and Who Wants to Live Forever. And, Demis Hassabis, you were pondering on mortality and the searing proximity of death. I'm wondering if that might be why when Google came a-knocking in 2014 and said, we want to buy your company, you said, yes, because, of course, to be a founder of a company is a precious thing. To have seen it from its infancy to being, as it has been, a..."}, {"start": 1626.13, "end": 1631.6, "text": "Pioneering and significant world presence in artificial intelligence. Why did you say yes to Google?"}, {"start": 1631.6, "end": 1660.98, "text": "I said yes, actually, precisely because of that reason. I did a year of due diligence on them and how it was going to work post the acquisition. And for me, it was nothing to do with the money. In fact, my investors mostly didn't want to sell, even though it was a lot of money. It's because I was convinced that by joining forces with Google, we could accelerate the progress of the mission. By using Google's power and all their resources, we could explore this space of algorithms much faster. I could hire more brilliant research scientists and the whole..."}, {"start": 1660.98, "end": 1687.18, "text": "And that's what's happened over the last three years. So it's worked. Artificial intelligence and all its associated technology does, of course, have the ability to threaten lots of traditional jobs. Once AI has got it covered, then we won't need human beings to do it. And you said you think that there is a huge potentiality that is offered by that, whereas a lot of us just see a lot of unemployment."}, {"start": 1687.18, "end": 1716.46, "text": "Can you give me an example of where you think inroads are significantly being made? Yeah, so I can tell you right now. So, for example, we are using variants of the algorithms we use to crack the game of Go. And one in the medical area is we're looking at the problem of protein folding. So in biology, one of the biggest issues is how do proteins in the body fold into a 3D structure? Because the 3D structure determines how the protein is going to react and act in your body. And things like Alzheimer's, for example, may be because proteins have folded in the wrong way."}, {"start": 1716.46, "end": 1745.68, "text": "Now, what biologists dream of in pharmaceutical companies is if you could take an amino acid sequence and just tell straight away from the genetic sequence how the 3D structure is going to look, just from that, then you'd accelerate drug design by five or ten years. So at the moment it's laborious, and it takes years to find out the structure of these things. And we're applying AlphaGo type algorithms to a simulation of these proteins, and it's working out for itself how to fold the protein. Now, we're not there yet."}, {"start": 1745.68, "end": 1774.9, "text": "Yeah, we haven't cracked it yet, but we've got some promising initial results. And I think in another year or two, maybe we'll be at the level where it will be useful for drug discovery companies to use it as a virtual way of testing out different designs of drugs to target certain proteins. And that could then help with all sorts of diseases. What a great description. Thank you for that. We're going to go to your penultimate track then. So I've chosen a track by Daft Punk and I really like their most recent album, Random Access Memories. I think it's about..."}, {"start": 1774.9, "end": 1790.93, "text": "Or about computers or a robot maybe gaining consciousness or something like that. And talking about how quick life is going, I can't really believe I was 40 just last year. And look what you've done with your life. And I actually used it as the soundtrack to my 40th birthday."}, {"start": 1824.85, "end": 1850.98, "text": "That was Daft Punk and Motherboard. Demis Hassabis, you mentioned there and you gave a beautiful description of how AI might help in something as important as Alzheimer's research. And it suddenly occurred to me, of course, that your wife is involved. She is a fellow scientist. She's involved in Alzheimer research. Do you discuss work together? Yes, we do. You know, we often talk about how could that process of discovery be made more efficient? And, you know, what part could AI play in that to help us accelerate?"}, {"start": 1850.98, "end": 1877.09, "text": "The discoveries are badly needed with ageing population and the amount it costs to look after these people and the tragedy of that. I wonder if you have advice for the parents, you're a parent yourself, if you have advice for the parents of very prodigious, smart, advanced kids because you should be a pain in the neck and you're not. I sit here with you today and you're such a sort of..."}, {"start": 1877.09, "end": 1906.3, "text": "Warm, open, thoughtful. You lack any kind of condescension. You are very open to the idea of communicating with the rest of us. How did that come about and what do you think parents should do to make very bright young kids fit into the world? I think that what I would do is encourage them to explore heavily when they're young and really get a wide range of experiences. So encourage deepness and expertise in things, but not at the expense of everything else. Life's so rich, you should partake in all of it, right? So I think..."}, {"start": 1906.3, "end": 1936.3, "text": "The kind of skills I would teach children today are the ability to learn rather than the specific thing that you're learning. One of the first things you should learn about, which is not taught at schools, is about yourself. How do you work best? What do you want? What's your dreams? What are you excited about? And I think you have to explore that and find that out for yourself. And do you have concerns, as indeed we heard President Obama say in his final speech, about this individualisation of culture? That, you know, as our computers and as things like AI begin to allow us to live the lives that are,"}, {"start": 1936.3, "end": 1965.65, "text": "I agree. But I think that's been the case always with any kind of technology. Maybe it's accentuated today with our current technology, mobile, internet, AI, things like this. But I think it's important to be, again, very broad in your upbringing so that you're used to understanding different points of view, different things, and actually going and seeking that and enjoying that and learning how to deal with that sort of disagreement in a constructive way."}, {"start": 1965.65, "end": 1994.86, "text": "Demis, if we could only talk all day, but we've got to fit in. It's your final disc. Tell me about this final eighth disc. So I picked the soundtrack from the film Interstellar, which I think is an amazing film. And, you know, I love Chris Nolan as a director and a friend of mine now. And he works with Hans Zimmer a lot. And I just love all of Hans Zimmer's soundtracks. And I picked Interstellar because I think it relates to ultimately what I'm trying to do in this world, which is to understand the universe around us. And obviously Interstellar was all about that."}, {"start": 1994.86, "end": 2055.5, "text": "Understanding time and black holes and really our place in that universe. And, you know, that's what I hope to use AI for in the future. That was Hans Zimmer with part of the soundtrack to the film Interstellar. Demis, it's time now for me to give you some books. I give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. And what else are you going to take? It's a very difficult one, actually, but I think I'll take The Lord of the Rings because I read that several times when I was nine or something like that. And I think it's such a beautiful..."}, {"start": 2055.5, "end": 2080.99, "text": "World he created. I think being alone on the island, it would be maybe nice to have a very rich, deep, fantastical world to lose yourself in. Right. That's yours then. A luxury too. I was going to bring a solar powered chess computer so that I could play lots of games of chess. And maybe if I ever got rescued from the island, you know, maybe I'd be grandmaster level when I left. Don't get any sand in it then. You can have that. Which of the eight tracks would you like to save?"}, {"start": 2080.99, "end": 2175.31, "text": "I'd probably save the Vangelis track because I could mull over those lines. I think they're beautiful poetry for a very long time and sort of find renewed significance in it. It's you, Stema Sassabis. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thanks for having me. You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4. This is the BBC."}]}