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News18
07-06-2025
- Science
- News18
Google DeepMind CEO Predicts AI Will Help Humans Colonise The Galaxy Starting 2030
Last Updated: Google DeepMind CEO and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis said that starting 2030 humans will be able to colonise the galaxy and artificial intelligence will power this revolution. 2024 Nobel Prize winner and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told a news outlet recently that humans will be able to 'colonise the galaxy" starting 2030 and the revolution will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The Nobel chemistry laureate told WIRED that AI will lead humanity to far into the universe while turbocharging human productivity. Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize with David Baker 'for computational protein design", said the 'golden era' was only five years away and that AI models set to bring about a renaissance in human existence. 'If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era. AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world, curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources," Hassabis was quoted as saying in an interview with WIRED. AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, refers to an AI system with human-like cognitive abilities, capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across a wide range of tasks. 'If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonise the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030," he said. When asked whether abundance through AI would still result in unequal distribution, Demis Hassabis said the technology could make the world feel 'like a non-zero-sum game." Although AGI has the potential to open vast new frontiers for humanity, Hassabis has previously expressed concern that society may not be prepared for its impact and admitted that the risks and consequences of such powerful technology often keep him up at night. 'It's a sort of like probability distribution. But it's coming, either way it's coming very soon and I'm not sure society's quite ready for that yet. And we need to think that through and also think about these issues that I talked about earlier, to do with the controllability of these systems and also the access to these systems and ensuring that all goes well," he said. He has also advocated for creating a UN-style global body to oversee the development and governance of AGI. 'I would advocate for a kind of CERN for AGI, and by that, I mean a kind of international research-focused high-end collaboration on the frontiers of AGI development to try and make that as safe as possible," he further added.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Raspberry scented weirdness: will Elio be Pixar's wildest ride to date?
Pixar's film-makers are famously asked to pitch three unique ideas when proposing new projects. In terms of Elio, unique is very much the operative word. Presumably that pitch went somewhere along the lines of: 'A lonely kid is mistaken for Earth's ambassador by a UN-style council of sentient celestial bath bombs dipped in day-glow glitter and floating in a malfunctioning lava lamp.' If you thought Inside Out, with its candy-coloured Freudian crisis management team, was pushing it, the studio's latest project may make you suspect Pixar has fully surrendered to the void, and is now making films for children who are made of sherbet and tie-dye, rather than flesh and bones. Elio has been an ominously long time gestating. At least one director (Coco's Adrian Molina) has left, as has its original star (America Ferrera, who was once set to voice Elio's mother). The film was announced in 2022, and was originally scheduled for release in 2024 before being bumped owing to industry strikes and Disney's evolving release strategy. But such hiccups are not, it seems, terminal, for happily it is in the nature of Pixar projects that they can be workshopped again, re-rendered and emotionally fine-tuned in the digital ether long after the initial pitch. At a screening of footage this week it became clear that Elio has every chance of joining Up, Wall-E and the Toy Story films at the zenith of the studio's work. It may be weirder than anything we've yet seen – at one point our hero makes friends with a tardigrade as reimagined by Takashi Murakami. But the whole thing looks to be conceived with such care, clarity and cosmic heart that we're reassured they haven't lost the plot – just decided to colour it in with raspberry-scented, jellybean-flavoured crayons from another dimension. Elio's storyline centres on the titular 11-year-old orphan, newly adrift after the death of his parents and now living with his aunt (a kind but driven, overworked wannabe astronaut voiced by Zoe Saldaña). Lonely, friendless and emotionally marooned, he's developed a not-so-quiet conviction that somewhere out there, the universe is just waiting to deliver him into the kind of epic, star-straddling adventure that might finally make him feel seen. It's not giving too much away to reveal that Elio's dream comes true – and he is soon delivered into the many welcoming limbs of the Communiverse, a sort of UN-style council of extreme cosmic decency that promptly honours him as Earth's esteemed leader. Unfortunately, he's arrived at the precise moment the intergalactic parliament is facing a terrible new threat that it appears pitifully ill-equipped to handle. There's a definite hint of ET to Elio's wide-eyed longing for connection with something beyond the stratosphere. But where Spielberg never showed us the extraterrestrial's home planet – or even the inside of his ship – directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi are determined to shine a very bright light on the glowing, pulsating, neon-drenched heart of the galaxy. If you ever despaired at the constraints of 1970s and 80s sci-fi – films that, for technical and budgetary reasons, left a lot to the imagination – Elio looks as if it might just finally reward your faith, especially if your idea of outer space is an interstellar disco thrown by Ziggy Stardust inside a melted pack of Skittles.
