[0:00:17] Thanks, everyone, for coming. I'm David Joseph, CEO of the Royal Society of Arts. This evening is one of the highlights of our year. It's the night we choose one person, one idea, and say that it mattered. Before we do, a word about where you're sitting, which is the Great Room. So in this room in 1877, Alexander Graham Bell showed people the telephone. They stood about where you are and heard a voice come out of a box.
[0:00:46] And in this room, Sir William Cook unveiled the electric telegraph. And until that afternoon, the fastest a message had ever travelled was the speed of a horse. In this room, Thomas Edison's light bulb was first shown to the British public for the first time. Light in your house that wasn't a flame. And this isn't a museum of things. These were actual nights. People walked in not knowing.
[0:01:14] And walked out having seen history made. And by the way, every single time someone sensible explained why it wouldn't work. When Edison said he was building a light bulb, gas shares crashed. And Parliament set up a committee. The committee concluded the whole idea wasn't worth the attention of practical men. And when the telephone turned up, the Post Office took it to court.
[0:01:45] And one, on the grounds that a telephone was legally a telegraph and a phone call was legally a telegram. I personally can't get the image out of a telephone in handcuffs at the back of a police car. But every time something arrives, sensible people explain why it can't happen. And a few years later, it's in everybody's house.
[0:02:10] And that's what's special about the Royal Society of Arts. For more than 270 years, this has been the place where people bring ideas and test them before the rest of the world has decided what to make of them. It's also why this year we'll be setting the Royal Society of Arts as the home of creativity for the common good. It sounds like a mission, but it's really a return to what this place has always tried to do. Find people with ideas and bring different worlds together.
[0:02:40] And put creativity to work, making life better for everyone. Which brings me to the medal and why we're all here tonight. Prince Albert ran the society for 18 years. When he died, the society made a medal in his name. In 1864, we gave the first one to a man called Roland Hill. Hill's idea was that a letter should go anywhere in the country for a penny. That sounds small, but it wasn't.
[0:03:12] You paid whenever the letter arrived, and the further it had come, the more it cost you. People turned letters away at their door because they couldn't afford to find out what was inside. Hill's penny fixed it, and overnight, anybody could write to anyone. After Hill, the medal went to Marie Curie for radium, to Alexander Graham Bell back again, but this time for the telephone he'd showed us in this room 25 years before.
[0:03:42] To Winston Churchill in 1945. To Stephen Hawking for putting physics into ordinary people's heads. To Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web. To Zerreen Karras for co-founding JustGiving. And to Sarah Gilbert for the Oxford vaccine. None of it looked obvious at the time. I spent most of my life working in music, so please bear with me for one more minute.
[0:04:09] In 1982, a branch of the Musicians' Union voted to ban the synthesiser. Not limit it, ban it. Their worry was simple. One keyboard could sound like a string section, and a string section was 40 jobs. What tipped them over was Barry Manilow, who is ahead of his time. Barry Manilow was touring Britain with synths instead of the orchestra he'd bought.
[0:04:39] The time before. So the idea of the band was madness, but the fear underneath it wasn't. They were wrong about the machine. Synths were hopeless at sounding like violins and brilliant at sounding like something never heard before. And the whole sound of the 80s came out of that. They weren't wrong about the musicians. Some of these players never worked again. Others were fine. Nobody could tell you at the time which could be which.
[0:05:08] And that's worth remembering. Things change. Sometimes we resist them and sometimes we embrace them. And sometimes we only understand what they meant years later looking back. But there are a few people who seem to know what matters before the rest of us do and who help us see to it. Which brings me to this year's medal recipient, Sir Demis Hassabis.
[0:05:46] Now, if you want to feel really bad about yourself, listen up. Chess master at 13, wrote a computer game at 17 that sold millions. Cambridge, then a doctorate in how memory works in the brain. Then he started DeepMind and DeepMind built the machine that built the best Go player in the world. He's been a fellow of the society since 2009.
[0:06:14] He was later made a Royal Designer for Industry, the highest honour for a designer in this country. He stood in this room in 2016 and talked to us about artificial intelligence. No one sitting here could have told you which bits would come true. Since then, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Knighthood, the Lasker, the Breakthrough, the Gardner. Three of the biggest prizes in medicine, one after another.
[0:06:46] And here's what he actually did. Your body is run by proteins, tiny machines, millions of them, doing every job going. Digesting your dinner, fighting off a cold. And what each one depends on is its shape. So if you want to understand a disease or build a drug, you need the shape. That's the whole game. And getting the shape of one protein, just one, could take a scientist years.
[0:07:15] Sometimes a whole career. AlphaFold has now done 262 million of them. And he gave every single one away free to every researcher on Earth. Roland Hill would have recognised that. People had gone at that problem the same way for 50 years. And what changed was somebody looking at it differently. That's a creative act for the common good. His dad is a singer-songwriter.
[0:07:54] He's always admired Bob Dylan. And in retirement, he's composed and staged a musical. So whatever that house was doing, it was really working. He carries all of this lightly, which I think is how you can tell he's a British scientist. Now, this medal matters too much to hand it over carelessly. We think whoever presents it should know the recipient properly. So I asked Demis' team whether someone might say a few words.
[0:08:26] It took them about a second to come back with Professor Hannah Fry. I should declare a personal interest. Hannah once dissolved a bank card in nail varnish remover on television to show the thin copper wire hidden inside it. We tried it at home. And now every time we pay the bill in a restaurant, someone at the table has to mention the wire. And I love that. That's one of the most remarkable things about Hannah.
[0:08:54] She takes something you've carried in your pocket for 20 years and shows you the idea inside it. And that's why we're here tonight. Not the invention, the moment somebody thought of it. Please give a very warm welcome to Professor Hannah Fry. Thank you very much, David.
[0:09:22] Okay, well, David has already taken us through some of the biggest achievements that Demis has made, which is useful because I think reading out Demis's entire CV would take us through to next morning. But I'm here instead to give you a little bit more of a picture of the person who's sitting in front of us. When I very first got to interview Demis back in 2017, I was going through the frankly absurd list of things that he'd achieved before most of us have even worked out what we're good at.
[0:09:50] Chess prodigy, games designer, Cambridge graduate, world-class neuroscientist. And I cheekily decided to ask him, Demis, could you not have tried a bit harder? And rather than just laugh it off, Demis told me this incredible story about when he was a kid and his dad had offered him the exact same piece of advice. It doesn't matter.
[0:10:11] How well you do as long as you try your hardest. Now, rather than hearing that as reassurance, Demis, who, by the way, was aged about nine at this point, heard it instead as a philosophical problem here. Because how do you actually know that you've tried your hardest? How do you manage to optimize for effort without dying? Because the thing is, I mean, there is a logic to it here. If you are alive at the end of it, then surely you had a bit more to give.
[0:10:40] Now, the DeepMind... This is a picture of you as a child, I think, Dennis. The DeepMind co-founder, Shane Legge, he puts it really well. He says, there is no 50% mode in Dennis, right? There isn't even a 99% mode. There is only 100%. And as somebody who has played Bananagram with Dennis, can I just confirm how accurate that is, right? By the way, word of advice.
[0:11:05] If you get that option, don't take it. It's not good for your ego. Now, I think there is something else in that story about when Demis was a child that is really worth noting. Because the thing that strikes me about Demis is that he appears to have spent his entire life asking...
[0:11:20] I mean, on the surface, unreasonable questions, right? Not just how do I get better at chess, but what is it in my brain? What is my brain actually doing when I am playing chess? Not just how do I build a computer game, but how much of reality could be captured by simulation? Not just can AI beat us at games, but can AI help us to solve some of the hardest problems in science and help humanity while we're at it?
[0:11:48] And that last bit, that's the bit I think that really matters here. Because with Demis, I've seen firsthand how the concern for humanity isn't just something that gets tacked on afterwards. It is right there at every single stage of his thought process.
[0:12:02] The ambition is enormous, of course, but so is Demis's extraordinary sense of responsibility that comes with it. And I think that's the combination, right? Extraordinary ambition, relentless curiosity, and a genuine concern for where it all leads that really makes Demis quite so special. It's also why so many people, myself included, feel so much more optimistic about the future, knowing that Demis is such a key part of shaping it. And all of that, I think, feels particularly fitting.
[0:12:32] Thank you all of you for coming this evening.
[0:13:18] Thank you, David and Hannah, for those amazing introductions and opening remarks. So generous of you. It's always an enormous pleasure for me to...
[0:13:28] Come and visit the RSA and especially be in this room. As they reminded me, I gave a talk about it here 10 years ago. It felt much more recent than that. But it's just such an inspiring space. And all of the amazing things that have happened in this room, the amazing art that we see. And it's a huge honor to be awarded the Albert Medal.
[0:13:55] Especially as I was looking back through all the previous recipients and all these amazing people. And what I really love about it is the interdisciplinary nature of what it celebrates and recognizes. And that's the way I've tried to...
[0:14:11] Live my whole life and run my career is not really seeing any boundaries between creativity and science. In fact, much the opposite. I've always worked at the intersection of technology and creativity right from the very beginning. David mentioned my early games career, designing and programming video games mostly in the 90s, in the early stages of the games industry. And I was so...
[0:14:39] I was fascinated by the games industry at that time because it was really using creativity, this idea of making something fun or interesting for millions of people to interact with. But that goal, the creative goal, was driving all of this amazing technology advancements. At the time, it was inventing 3D graphics. I was using it to try and push AI at the forefront of what was going on.
[0:15:08] Beyond what was happening in academia at that time was actually the game industry that was pushing forward a lot of AI ideas and then even the hardware. So the hardware we use today, the GPUs that we use for AI were originally, of course, invented for 3D graphics. And it turns out that...
[0:15:31] You know, everything is a matrix multiplication, it turns out. So it's maybe in the universe, but we can maybe talk about that later at dinner, at the drinks. But it's kind of incredible that there's things that, not only the direct things that you were trying to do, but these sort of ancillary benefits appear. And that's been one of the lessons I've taken throughout my career, is you pursue a goal for its own sake, and then if it's a big enough, ambitious enough goal, and multidisciplinary enough,
[0:16:00] Other amazing things will happen and be facilitated by that that you couldn't have imagined at the time. And I think there's just so many examples of that. And I guess I was brought up in a household and David mentioned my dad, my mom, and actually my brother and sister, they're all on the creative side of things. You know, music and my sister's a professional musician and composer and games playing and the arts is really...
[0:16:25] Where my whole family, I guess my genetics is, my kind of upbringing is about that. But the interesting thing for me is I trained...
[0:16:33] First through chess, then computers, and then the sciences. My whole formal training has all been on the scientific, logical side. But at my heart, I think of myself as being led creatively, intuitively, and emotionally, actually, which is maybe you wouldn't expect to hear that from a scientist. But I think that's also what's helped me in my science. You know, I think what separates the good scientists from the great scientists is creativity. Like all, you know, good professional scientists...
[0:17:03] They're already, by definition, brilliant technically.
[0:17:07] At what they do, otherwise they wouldn't have reached that level. But then it's the creative side that I think, and intuitive leaps that I think are the things that have yielded the big breakthroughs. If you look again at some of the people that were mentioned, recipients of the Albert Medal and those other big prizes, it's basically their leaps of intuition often that lead them to their big breakthroughs, underpinned by their technical capabilities.
[0:17:34] So I think, again, as we look forward now to AI, this is a, you know, you've all probably heard me give talks about, I think it's, and I spent my whole career working on AI in one form or another because I think it's going to be one of the most profound technologies humanity will ever invent. And I think it will be a revolution in the way that electricity was.
[0:17:57] Telephone, we've heard the internet, mobile. I think it will be at least as big, but perhaps bigger than all of those. Maybe something like 10 times the impact of the Industrial Revolution. And the additional challenge is that it's probably going to happen 10 times faster. So unfolding over a decade instead of a century. And the Industrial Revolution brought many amazing things. Modern medicine, child mortality went down. All of these incredible things in the end that it brought, but it also came with challenges.
[0:18:25] And in fact, new institutions, new approaches were needed to deal with the downsides of industrialization and the environment, the effect on the environment and so on. And I think, again, with AI, there's just unbelievable opportunity.
[0:18:41] One of the main reasons and motivations for me to work on AI my whole life is to advance science and medicine. That's why I personally work on things like AlphaFold and now I'll spin out Isomorphic to accelerate drug discovery. I've always said that the number one thing I think we can apply AI to is improving human health. And I still believe that now. And I think ultimately it could be the most amazing tool.
[0:19:08] Thank you.
[0:19:23] The technology, it's also about what do we want as a society to do with it? You know, the technology just enables all these opportunities, right? All these possibilities, all these paths. And that's what I see as a technologist and an engineer and a scientist. But it doesn't define what we should do with it all. What is beneficial for society? How should it shape the next era of humanity? And I think that's for the arts.
[0:19:48] And humanities and social sciences and those aspects that are represented by the RSA and many of the people in this room about shaping that and guiding humanity into that next era in a way that is going to be beneficial for everyone. And I think that's almost a philosophical problem, actually. And I've often talked about the need for...
[0:20:09] At this juncture, when we're on the cusp, on the eve of the foothills of the singularity, I like to call it, a few years away from a full AGI, we need to start thinking about that now. I don't think society is ready yet for what's coming. What are we going to value?
[0:20:26] What is purpose? How are we going to use these tools to enhance human creativity, not replace it? What is the difference between craft and the soul of a creative piece going to be in the world of AI? Really fascinating questions that I think the technologists are not best placed to answer, actually. I think that's got to come from the arts and the humanities to define that next era. And what I really hope...
[0:20:56] And I think that's more important than ever in this new era of AI. Like, what is it going to mean to be human and the things that we create and then value? And I've no doubt, so the optimistic part of me is I've no doubt we will be able to deal with this new era and adapt to it because I really believe in the power of human ingenuity. Again, represented by...
[0:21:25] And I think what Dame Judi Dench mentioned about, isn't it amazing what we've already created with our creative minds? You know, I often stop and marvel when I go on a transatlantic flight of how did we do this with our...
[0:21:40] Brains that were evolved for hunter gathering out in the tundra. How have we managed to create all of this art and this beauty and this modern, what we call modern civilization, including all of our technologies, like flying on a 747 across the ocean? It's just miraculous if you think about it. So if we manage to do that and adapt to here, I've got no doubt we and the next generation will figure out what to do next. But we need to take...
[0:22:09] We need to take it seriously. We need to start that debate yesterday because I think this is coming very fast towards us. But I'm sure we'll work through it and we'll come out the other side in a bright new future and what I hope will be almost a new renaissance, a new coming together of science and the arts maybe that hasn't happened since the renaissance. I think we're due that again and perhaps it will unleash a new golden era of scientific discovery and wonder.
[0:22:39] Thank you very much. I mean, you ended your comments there talking about the Renaissance. I always thought it was really notable that for a number of years, your office at DeepMind was named after Da Vinci. Why Da Vinci? What is it about Da Vinci that inspired you so much? So I have sort of three or four favorite, I guess you can call them scientific heroes of all time.
[0:23:14] Da Vinci is one of them and Aristotle is the other because of their all-roundedness. You know, you could say Da Vinci, you know, his incredible artistic talents, like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and so on. And then you look at his like medical and engineering diagrams and he painted these exquisitely beautiful, you know, drawings of the heart and the lungs and lots of biology. And he wouldn't have been able to do that
[0:23:42] To the scientific level of accuracy, if he wasn't brilliant at from the artistic side. So I just find him fascinating. And I'd love to see that type of era again. And I think AI could maybe help with that. So he's always been my big inspiration for me. He's like the ultimate interdisciplinarity. Yes, exactly. And I think if you read biographies of him, it's that he just didn't see any...
[0:24:06] Any boundaries between what he was able to do. I don't think he thought about it as I'm doing art now, I'm doing science now. He just drew, he just did amazing things, produced amazing things. In terms of those boundaries, I mean, David was talking about your family background, the fact that all of your family are artists. Did you feel...
[0:24:24] A boundary, as it were, when you were growing up. Did you feel like the odd one out or did it just feel like you were doing? No, when I was young, it didn't. I mean, later I realized it sort of, I kind of realized that in my, maybe my late 20s or something. But I sort of described my parents as bohemian in the sense of like, we had no money, but it was always, you know, just sort of being creative. And I think my dad encouraged.
[0:24:51] Not being conventional, let's put it that way. So my parents have never had sort of normal nine to five jobs and they didn't really believe in that. So I guess that gave all of us, the kids, the sort of permission to be kind of unconventional, follow your passions. And then my mum was always more on the kind of spiritual and art side. So I've always had that kind of input, the humanities, if you want to call it, coming through that. And then I think it was just a great, happened to be a great...
[0:25:19] And then having to get better at those things encouraged me to improve my logical scientific part of my mind. I think what I really loved about computers and chess and all those things was the creative output. So designing games or playing great games of chess. These are kind of artistic pursuits really and outputs. But you have to be very technical to produce...
[0:25:49] Outputs worthy of the name. So you sort of have to get good at all of the mathematics and the sciences. And then really for me, the North Star for me since I was a kid is...
[0:26:04] Trying to answer the big questions and the big mysteries of the world around us. And for that, I think you need both the art side and the scientific side to really truly understand a lot of these questions, the nature of consciousness, creativity, dreaming, time. You mentioned it, I've been interested in it. So, you know, there's so many fascinating things in my opinion to look into.
[0:26:29] That's what led me to AI in the end pretty quickly because I felt we needed a meta tool to help us and help me with answering as many of those questions as one can in what is a relatively short lifetime.
[0:26:42] Well, I guess your second career by 16 as a games designer is sort of a good illustration of that point. You know, it's kind of a creative pursuit on the one level, but it was also your first foray into AI really, right? Yes. Tell us how what you were doing there ended up being the very beginnings of what happened with D-Mind. Well, because there's not enough time in general. So I've always been in this rush because there's so many things, so many amazing things to discover and create.
[0:27:08] And experience. And also because there's so many interesting things to do. I like doing things for more than one reason generally. So at least four reasons if possible. So games was a great one. So I love games.
[0:27:23] Designing and playing games, I could see the enjoyment people would get from them. But I also used it as a bit of a Trojan horse, especially with my own company, Elixir Studios, to get some AI research funded somehow, which you couldn't get funded any other way. We're talking about early 90s here, right? It's impossible to get it funded any other way. But I was trying to sneak in some AI research with people like Dave Silver, like ostensibly to do our games and to control the little people or the simulation under the game.
[0:27:50] And then that would become successful and then could fund the next ideas in AI. So I was learning about all of that and also learning how to manage startups, but also creative engineering teams. So something I took with me from that to DeepMind was how do you combine cutting edge engineering with something that's a creative objective? So in this case, it was...
[0:28:15] When is it going to be fun? If you want to really scare a designer, game designer, you could just ask them that question. So when is this game going to be fun? And is it going to be in three months or six months? And it's like, well, I don't know, because obviously your publishers are paying for it. They're just like, is it fun now? No, not yet, but it will be. And that's a little bit, it reminded me of then when I did my PhD of like the sort of like, well, when is this breakthrough going to happen? You know, that you want to, because research.
[0:28:42] If you knew the answer already, then it wouldn't be research. If you knew, could guarantee it was going to be fun, then it wouldn't be creative what you were building, right? So actually, I realized it was very analogous in terms of the creative part of it. This unknown, it needed a lot of taste and intuition and kind of faith in what you're doing. And I realized doing science and game design, that was quite similar. That there's games designers and artists in the games, the best ones.
[0:29:09] To me, it felt quite similar in what they were doing to the best scientists that I'd met. And then underpinning that was this combination with great engineering and technical capability and sort of like, how do you mix that together? And so the difficulty we used to have in games is you've got all this engineering going on and it's trying to...
[0:29:29] And that's a little bit like the same in science. It's like we've got to build all these technologies, especially in AI, supporting something like AlphaFold. You don't exactly know when it will be done, but you kind of know the types of things you've got to build. And it's an iterative thing. That's why I love building multidisciplinary teams. They've got to feed into each other. The engineering informs the research, and the research informs the next part of the engineering. And that's why things like AlphaFold and AlphaGo are successful.
[0:29:59] I mean, you mentioned your PhD there. We should probably talk about this as well, because I mean, this was quite a corner turn from the surface, looking at it from games designer to neuroscientist, especially looking at imagination in the brain. And that sort of feels like quite a big, sharp change in direction. But for you, it was another piece of the same puzzle. Yeah, so for me, it was just different angles. I think if you didn't realise I was...
[0:30:21] Trying to build DeepMind and AGI, then it would look a bit strange, right? So I was doing game design. I did computer science as my undergraduate at Cambridge. Why would you switch to neuroscience? Well, it's because I was trying to look at the question from every angle possible. Like, what is intelligence? What are the capabilities that underlie intelligence? And again, with my PhD. So I felt during my games career, my early 20s, I'd pushed AI.
[0:30:48] Knowledge as far as it could go as it was known then.
[0:30:51] So this was the mid-90s before the neural network revolution and so on. So I was looking for kind of, you know, in the early 2000s, an orthogonal source of information about how does intelligence work and thinking and planning and all the things that we regard as being intelligent. So what better place to look than the brain? And of course, fMRI machines had just become kind of mainstream. So there was all these new incredible tools to use. You know, we could look inside the brain. If you think about an fMRI machine, that's kind of amazing as well.
[0:31:20] We all do it, you know, use it for our medical exams, you know, routinely now. But back in the early 2000s, it was sort of kind of this incredible thing. You're going to look inside the brain and with these massive magnets and see what bits light up when you think. I mean, it was kind of irresistible to me, to be honest, that you could make some progress there about some of the big questions about thinking and so on. And then I picked memory and imagination because, firstly, they're fascinating topics, but imagination specifically, like planning for the future.
[0:31:48] That was what I was doing a lot in my games and chess career was, you know, effectively in chess, you're like planning forward to some, you know, you want to checkmate someone or get to a winning position. You imagine that and then you plan back, you visualize that and you plan back from there. So I don't know if you've all seen Queen's Gambit, the series, amazing series. It's very accurate because Garry Kasparov, you know.
[0:32:09] I was consulting on that, and she's dreaming about the positions when she's sleeping, and they're kind of in her mind. That is actually how it feels when you're a top chess player. So I'd experienced all of that, and then same in game design. I reused that as like, okay, so answering this question of when it's going to be fun, you imagine someone playing it, and what are the difficulties they're going to have? When are they going to get bored, and how is the interface going to work, and all of those things. You're kind of viscerally imagining it.
[0:32:38] So I was very fascinated by how the brain does it, and almost no one had looked at this question of imagination. They looked at memory, but not imagination. And then also, of course, it was something we had no idea how to do with AI. So it was a capability that seemed fundamental to the way we create and plan and reason, but we had no idea how to do with AI at that time. So for multiple reasons, again, that seemed like a good thing to look at.
[0:33:08] As a third reason, I wanted to understand, you know, some of the top universities in the world, learning from some of the best professors, how does research work and how does discovering new things at the coalface of, you know, the frontier of knowledge, how does that feel? And it's exhilarating. So, and it's amazing, but there's a whole process to it too that I think a lot of my technologists sort of colleagues don't understand because it's different from engineering.
[0:33:37] I mean, when you put them together like that, it does sort of feel as though it has all been the same question all along. You know, you've got the brain as sort of a simulation engine, the games are a simulation engine. I mean, even in a way, chess and literature and music, you're sort of constructing this version of reality that you get to sort of go and spend a little bit of time in. It is the same question, really, isn't it? It is, really. I mean, so I think that the two twin fascinations I've had, I mean, I've been lucky in my life.
[0:34:06] And then the second thing is simulations.
[0:34:25] Using those accurate, building accurate simulators. Originally, I was doing them by hand for games. But they were little, you know, little microcosms of what I would go on to do. So, you know, even my first game theme park that David mentioned was a little simulation of a Disney World. And it was unheard of to try and do that in 1993, 94. And I was amazed by how far you could get, you know, to the extent where...
[0:34:48] 10 million people would enjoy interacting with that fairly basic simulation of a theme park. And of course, that leads me to the bigger question of like, well, what's going on here? I'm not subscribing to some...
[0:35:03] Basic kind of simulation theory. But one does have to sort of think through, you know, computationally and from a physics point of view, and I talked to a lot of physicists about this, what is really underpinning the nature of reality, which in my opinion is the ultimate question. And so, yeah, for me, all the paths lead to that question.
[0:35:22] Let me ask you a bit about AI and creativity, because I think, you know, we've already seen so much change in the way that sort of the artist and their tools, as it were. What do you think the new creative process will look like as we go forwards in the future?
[0:35:38] Well, it's very interesting. And I think I've been observing it. We've tried to build tools. So we've gone a different path for some of our other competitors where we've tried to build tools in collaboration with top artists who are the top of what they do. So they can inform us while we're designing these things. What do they want? What do they need? What will help them in their creative process versus sort of get in the way?
[0:36:01] And so we work with people like Darren Aronofsky and top musicians from every different creative field. Games designers, we've partnered with this Icelandic company that builds EVE Online. So all the different creative pursuits, we've tried to partner with several top creators in those areas. And really early on, so that we can work with them to define what these tools are going to end up doing. And I think what I've seen so far, just like any technology, is...
[0:36:31] They can be used for things that are really enhancing to humanity, but they can also be used for things that are not great. And I think we're seeing some of that, again, with AI, right? So there's this notion of AI slop, which is just sort of, you know, kind of fairly creatively mundane or not interesting creatively, but it's there to kind of, you know, hook an audience for a few seconds. And I think we don't really want to be going in that direction, ideally. Although, you know, it's...
[0:37:00] Maybe it's fine as kind of light entertainment. But then on the other side of the ledger, you've got amazing tools that you could use for prototyping. So what I've seen great artists do is now they can go through, iterate through.
[0:37:14] Many more ideas and test them out early and before committing too many resources to find the idea that they really want to back or commit to. So I think that's great for the people already at the top of their game. So they love that part aspect of it. And it also enables them to do things because maybe it's cheaper or quicker to do. They could enable them to do some creative projects they couldn't have undertaken otherwise. They wouldn't have got the funding or the resources to do.
[0:37:41] But the other exciting thing is, you know, the next up and coming artists, they're able to maybe make breakthroughs quicker into the professional world because they can like, instead of just, you know, putting together a slide deck about maybe what film you want to make, you could actually, you know.
[0:37:57] And I think it's up to us and the creative community to try and push it in a positive direction. But I think we're also going to have to answer what is it that...
[0:38:19] We are going to appreciate in the future. And it probably forced us to be a little bit more specific about terms we use every day, like craft, intuition, the soul of a piece. I believe in all those concepts, but what does it mean exactly? And I think we're going to have to more carefully define those things. And I think we'll be able to understand them better in this next era.
[0:38:43] Well, I also think there's something in this about how we define ourselves. Because I think for a really long time, humans have thought of ourselves as like the thing that makes us important on this earth is that we can solve complex problems, we can have ingenuity, we can be creative. But now that we're seeing machines getting better and better and better at all of those pursuits, I wonder how humans will define themselves in future. Yeah.
[0:39:12] I think there's going to be sort of two periods we're going to see. So the next 10 years or so, I think we're going to see an incredible flourishing of creativity in the sense we'll have these amazing tools that the best human creative scientists or artists can use to 10x what they produce. So that, I think, is going to be the next year. It's going to be pretty amazing, I think. But then after that, these tools might continue to get better.
[0:39:37] And more autonomous. And then the question is what happens after that. I suspect, but I think again it's for society to shape, that the human connection and the human creativity and the human craft and soul will be more important than ever. That's what I'm guessing is going to happen. In the same way that we still appreciate the old masters and the original art versus...
[0:40:00] We could copy it many times today, but we don't appreciate that as much. The question is, what's going to happen? I think part of that is the human craft and effort and discipline that's gone in to being a great piano player, a great chess player, a great mathematician, a great artist. But what if there's some shortcut to that? So then you can't define it by the effort that has gone in. So I think we will need to collectively work out...
[0:40:27] I really mean it when I say, what are we going to value? What are we going to consider to be a virtue? What are we going to appreciate and recognize and celebrate? And depending on those things and august societies like this, that will then lead the next generation, you know, our kids who are going to be growing up with this technology native.
[0:40:48] They'll be able to do incredible things, but what sorts of things are we going to encourage a society as the right direction for those things to be built in? And that's true of everything from the new interactive experiences we create. I think I can imagine a world where we create...
[0:41:07] Thank you very much.
[0:41:33] You know, philosophical, societal overlay of like, well, what do we actually want intentionally? I think we need to be very intentional about this technology of what do we want it to do? Because it could probably facilitate almost anything. So that's the good news. I think the future is really not written. And I don't believe anyone who says it is. Any technologists, they don't know. I can tell you, we don't know what is going to happen. Nobody does. And anyone telling you they do, they're lying or they're doing it for ulterior motives. It's still to be determined. So that's the good news.
[0:42:03] But we have to, you and we all from different parts of the site have to get involved, take it seriously. It's not going back in a box. It's not going away.
[0:42:12] But there are many amazing things that can happen with it. And there are some not so good things. And I mean that technically. We've got to make sure it's safe as they get more autonomous and so on. There's technical risks. But we've got to think about it. Even if we get the technology right, are we going to get the economics of it right so everyone shares in it? And are we going to get the philosophical points right? And I think this affects everything. And I see Thomas and other architects in the room from our physical world to our artistic world to our philosophical world.
[0:42:41] And I think...
[0:42:52] As you say, standing in the foothills of singularity, I think that change does feel like quite a scary thing, with so much potential and so much possibility. But I also know that every time I get to talk to you, I walk away with a renewed sense of optimism for how things could possibly turn out. So maybe as my last question before we come to the audience, maybe my last question for you then is paint us a picture of what could we be aiming for? It's not written yet, but how good could the future be?
[0:43:20] Well, I think the best version of the future would be one where we have these incredible new tools that we carefully and sensibly sort of steward into the world and thoughtfully do that, that enable incredible new advances in science and in medicine. So we solve some terrible diseases, maybe all of them eventually. We come up with better materials, new energy sources. So we really help with the environment.
[0:43:49] We solve fusion, other things, quantum computers. Then that resolves a lot of things that are big societal challenges today, from the environment to water access to resources in general. And so that could be amazing. So we'll enter a world of abundance. And then that will unlock things like...
[0:44:14] You know, proper space travel, because really it's down to like how do you create the fuel now at this point, which is an energy problem. So a lot of these things can be fixed with solutions to particular kind of root nodes. And then we are potentially in a new era of maximum human flourishing, but we have to get, I think the economics and the philosophical side will be the biggest challenges at that point.
[0:44:38] And the idea of purpose and value and some of the things I mentioned this evening, those are going to be the bigger challenges. But from the arts perspective, we could also unlock new levels of aesthetic.
[0:44:52] You know, judgment and refinement potentially, like there's no reason, like we sort of opened by discussing this, our brain was invented for, you know, evolved for hunter gathering, right? And yet here we are appreciating fine art and creating fine art and physical things like architecture and amazing technologies like, you know, sciences.
[0:45:14] But that's not the limit of that. Maybe there's new forms of art to be discovered. And I think these tools used in the right way will help us discover that.
[0:45:24] New world of, that's why I call it scientific discovery and wonder. So I think it could be amazing. And I think even there, the best blueprints for that come from the arts, from some amazing science fiction. And any of you who are science fiction writers in the room or script writers, you know, what we need is more examples of good North stars that are grounded in science, hard science, so that they're plausible and potentially...
[0:45:49] Potentially doable, but there are good North Stars. And for me, when I was growing up, it was Asimov's Foundation series, and it was Ian Banks' Culture series that really inspired the sorts of world or universe that I thought could be amazing for humanity to get to.
[0:46:08] I mean, alongside everything else, Demis, you've done a really great job of demonstrating why the RSA is so important. So I'm sure that they thank you for that. Exactly. Okay, we have a few questions in the audience. Kate, where are you? Thank you. Kate Farrer, the co-chief of the Second National Theatre. Thank you, that was completely fascinating. You talked really convincingly about the work you've been doing with artists to think about the ways that
[0:46:37] AI can enhance creativity, not replace it. And so I think I'd love to ask a question about how you think or whether you think there are any elements of human storytelling that are non-computable. And if so, how we could go about protecting them in the rush to innovate and adopt. Yeah, great question. Well, I think that's an open scientific question, actually, right? So I would call it an empirical question in the sense of
[0:47:07] What are the limits that we have with computers that the brain may be doing something different? And that's partly why I wanted to study neuroscience, because I was fascinated about the differences. I actually have always believed that building an intelligent artifact like AI and then comparing it to the human mind would be the best way for us to work out what remaining things are special or perhaps even unique about the human mind.
[0:47:34] This is an open debate. If you talk to someone like Roger Penrose, he will talk about quantum effects in the brain and the idea of quantum consciousness. If that's true, then classical computers, AI machines as they're built today, won't be able to do those things. Unfortunately, on that side of the edge, I'm not sure I agree with him. So I don't think there's any evidence so far. I'm on the side of Alan Turing here, which is that...
[0:48:01] Probably most of the things we're able to do, even though we're not sure how we do them, will eventually be computable, shown to be computable. So if that's true, then maybe machines will eventually be able to do some of these things if they're given enough inputs and data. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be better, because what is better? So there are some things like playing chess or Go, which you can measure, are they better than the other player?
[0:48:24] Are they better than the human champion and so on? But I think in the creative world, there isn't that notion of better in some linear fashion. So they'll just be different. And then I think it comes down to what's more meaningful to another human being. And the example I always give here is why do we, for some stories, bother, like, you know, whether it's a film or a book, sometimes it's like based on a true story.
[0:48:51] So why would we bother with that phrase if it didn't have some meaning? I think it's because in those particular stories, it's more meaningful to the audience to know that another human being went through that, actually went through that. So then that has some additive effect, right? I assume. Otherwise, why would you mention whether it was a true story or not? So that will never be true of an AI-created piece of art.
[0:49:16] So that you have that connection with the artist in the way when I look at an amazing Van Gogh or something, you can see his pain in every brushstroke, every stroke of his paintings. Would that be so meaningful if an AI robot was able to do that? Probably not, probably never for us as fellow human beings. But this is what needs to be unpacked, I think, philosophically.
[0:49:44] We have another question from Thomas. Hello. It's Thomas Heatherwick, our designer, architectural designer. I just wanted to say how thrilling it is to have this optimism from you and you existing here in London, in the capital of the UK, where there's a lot of non-optimism at the moment. And you give, I think, a lot of hope and excitement to...
[0:50:15] And I think we're not optimistic enough at all. And your decision to not base yourself over in California has been, I think, brilliant for the UK and sort of reflects British, what I think is the best of British, which is eccentricity. And you are no question a serious eccentric, which is the most rational thing to be.
[0:50:37] But my question was just, at the same time as the amazing planes that could have taken you to California and satellites and their phenomenal achievements, we have not been doing incredible things with our cities. And we've been making real soullessness at scale everywhere in the world. And at the same time, the earlier part of the digital revolution has been...
[0:51:03] Incredible in so many ways, but it's also making what I think Norena Hertz in her book said called the lonely century and this disconnection and people's toxic behavior with each other. And back to your thing of health. I think this is a great opportunity to stop thinking of buildings just as individual artworks, but buildings around us as public health.
[0:51:31] I'm fascinated as to what you see the potential is with these sort of, which you are unlocking here in Britain, in the heart of London, for how could we radically humanize the built world around us with someone like you who's passionate about buildings at the same time? Yes, well, thanks so much for that question. And also thanks for our amazing new buildings. You know, it's very inspiring. And I'm a big believer in your physical spaces, inspiring.
[0:52:00] Your next level of creativity. So I've always thought that's unbelievably important. And as we've discussed, I think something needs to be done about the physical world and architecture, especially in big cities, to be inspiring. And we somehow lost that.
[0:52:17] Since, you know, you could argue since World War II. And my favorite type of architecture is Art Deco. But, you know, you can see many beautiful evolutions of that Georgian all around London, actually. And then it's kind of stopped. And it's sort of strange why that is. And it shouldn't be like that. And I think one of the benefits of entering maybe an era where there's more abundance is we might not have to just use the cost as the only measure.
[0:52:43] And we've discussed this before. It shouldn't be the only measure of what you build. We should also factor in other factors about human health, human inspiration. How is that being factored into our next design of the next council estate or whatever that is? And as we've been talking about, we'll probably collaborate on things like there's a lot of new buildings going up, like data centers and other things to do with the new AI revolution. Well, maybe we should just spend a little bit more and make them beautiful.
[0:53:11] These are the new types of assets that we're building. We should be thinking about their effect on the physical environment as well. So I'm a huge believer in that, and that's part of what I want to spend some of my next few years thinking about as well, the impact positively of these new types of technologies. But it won't happen without...
[0:53:36] Some serious sort of creative effort and maybe even a new movement. And just to talk about London and why I've always, you know, I was born in North London and, you know, London born and bred and I just really love the UK and London. But partly because, you know, I grew up here and I like this a little bit understatedness or Britishness. But I think we should also, the thing the Americans do well is they're ambitious and they're optimistic about their ambition. And that is, and...
[0:54:05] We have to embrace that, I think, in Europe. Otherwise, we're just going to get left behind. And this is what I'm trying to explain about the AI thing. Don't just view it as it's to be shaped what happens with it. And it's going to happen. So you should just make peace with that and then use your talents to shape it in a positive way on the global stage. You're all capable of doing that. You've all got big impacts in your domains. And then you can argue till the cows come home. But actually, and this is the engineer part of me.
[0:54:34] You've just got to show it at some point. I was arguing with people for years about is the protein folding problem solvable or whatever. And it's good to have those debates because it hardens your ideas. Even when I set up DeepMind, I was doing my postdoc at MIT. I was in the cafeteria with some of the top professors at MIT. I won't name who they were. And they were saying this will never work. And this new learning type of approach will never work. It was tried in the 80s at MIT and didn't work. You've got to go for logic systems.
[0:55:04] And I listened very carefully to their arguments, and it just boiled down to dogma in the end. So there was no reason. So I was actually even more encouraged after. And bear in mind, these are some of the biggest professors in AI. It's one of the reasons I did my postdoc at MIT, because I wanted to meet them on their turf. And they didn't have good, in my view, first principles arguments why it wouldn't work.
[0:55:27] So then I was like, well, I wasn't sure it was going to work, but at least I would fail in a new, interesting way. And that's all you can hope for in science and research. Explore something new that could work, and if it doesn't work, you're adding to the knowledge, a brick to the wall of human knowledge. And that's all you can hope for, I think, in research. I was going to fail, and if it was going to not work, it was going to not work in an interesting new way.
[0:55:54] I think you've all got to do that and embrace that. And I think that's the part that we can bring as the UK is a bit of groundedness to the discussion. It's just, you know, because it can tip over into too much hype and so on. But also some compassion and empathy about what we're going to use these technologies for. I think that's also the European sensibility.
[0:56:13] But we've got to embrace the ambition and the optimism that this will work out. It's very easy to just focus on the negatives, right? Like, oh, this could go wrong, this could go wrong. Yeah, but it might not. And it's actually all up for grabs, in my opinion, what's going to happen from here. So we need more of us to get into the optimistic kind of space. And I think London specifically is great because of the ability to gather like this. So in the US...
[0:56:42] If you're in finance, you're in New York. If you're in government, you're in DC. If you're in tech, you're in San Francisco. And if you're in entertainment, you're in LA. In London, we have a melting pot of one city that has all of that together. So if multidisciplinary, and if you believe my thought of multidisciplinary is important, I think London is the most multidisciplinary city in the world, where you can talk to world-leading experts in science, architecture, art, all in one place.
[0:57:10] And again, this is, I think, something the RSA and the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering can use as convening power. And I don't think you can do that that easily anywhere else in the world at the highest level. See what I mean by how talking to Demis makes you feel better about the future. OK, I know loads of you will have tons of questions that you want to ask Demis, which I may get you to hold off for on the drinks. We have one last question from Usha. Where are you, Usha?
[0:57:40] I'm Usha. I'm an independent member of the House of Lords. Can I first of all say thank you very much indeed for a very inspiring, encouraging and optimistic talk. And I like the way you framed it because in terms of the challenges and so on. But can I ask a rather practical question? Because you see the potential of how we can harness AI in a very positive sense. But what I'm concerned about is that how do we ensure
[0:58:10] That we actually infuse our education system in a way which talks about it very positively and harnesses the potential because there's a great of talk about what is going to the cognitive development of children and so on. But it'd be very useful to hear from you the framing and what do we do now to ensure we actually realize the potential the way you've been talking about it. That's a really important question.
[0:58:38] So I don't know if you're going to like my answer, but I think something pretty radical has to happen with education. That's the first thing. Maybe it needed to anyway. I think, again, we're talking about a 50-year-old post-war system that I think needs updating anyway. My experience with school...
[0:58:57] And in the 90s, and my parents did some teaching as well later in their careers of kids that were behind. So they used to teach evening classes for kids that were behind and ahead at school. And the problem with the school system today is it caters for the sort of median. So if you're not in that, then you're sort of not really catered for. The smart kids, the talented kids are not pushed enough, and then they get distracted. And then the kids behind, they're not helped enough. So I think the other thing is,
[0:59:26] You know, again, this goes back to my answer to Thomas about we've got to, this is happening, the AI revolution. That can't be stopped, right? It's like the tide. It's going to happen. It's going to work. You should assume that. But what isn't is shaping what it's going to be. So either we as a country or we as individuals, we can just sort of worry about the pessimistic things, try and hold the tide back. You're not going to be successful. You know, China and US are going to do it, whatever.
[0:59:55] We do here, right, for starters. And then it gets shaped for us. Or we can try and lean in and shape it the way that fits what we believe in and our values.
[1:00:08] And I think that's what everyone needs to get into that mindset. That's the mindset I'm in. I've kind of made peace with it's going to be messy and it's not quite the way I planned it 20 years ago because it became commercial earlier than I thought. I would have done more scientific and alpha fold type things first and then gone to the more commercial chatbots. But what happened, happened. And we're going to get advances more quickly, but also the risks. So in coming to education, here again is like, I think we should accept that we've got to, in my opinion, train our...
[1:00:37] kids and our next generation to be native with AI. It would be like, you know, in the 90s, not training them on computers or the internet. They would be behind the rest of the world if you do that. And that's the only way they're going to then be fit, you know, have the tools and equipped with the skills to shape the future. But we can't do that. We've got to do that in a very intentional way again that helps with the learning. So my thought would be, recommendation would be, is potentially invert the classroom.
[1:01:06] So the classroom doesn't become about rote learning anymore. You do that out of class with the help of AI tools, because I think that's exactly what AI tools are good for. And the AI tools could do it personalized. So if you need a bit more help with algebra or whatever it is, because you're finding that particularly hard, the AI tool knows that and it gives you more questions on that, right? So imagine everyone will have a great personal tutor. You could imagine...
[1:01:29] People who are really good at lecturing or teaching materials, you just watch YouTube videos of the best maths teacher in the country. Why does everyone have, you know, I've got lots of friends of mine who are maths teachers and each of them are having to produce the same class materials. This doesn't make sense to me.
[1:01:46] And it's using up a lot of teacher time. So then what do you do in the classroom? That should be more like Montessori, project-based, human-human, all the things we're thinking about could be important for the future. Creativity, entrepreneurialism, working as a team, leading teams, being part of a team. Those things, I think, could be really amazing and fun to be done in school. And I think the teachers would prefer that.
[1:02:12] And just think about it really differently. It's a collaborative space and a project space. Like you maybe get in Oxbridge with like the supervision system, something like that. But bring that, you know, maybe Montessori schools. I didn't go to Montessori schools. I don't know exactly how it feels. But that type of approach, I think we need to explore those things.
[1:02:33] Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have run over by a few minutes, but I'm sure nobody minds because it has been absolutely fascinating to hear from you, Demis. Please join me in giving one last round of applause for Demis Sallis.