We had the first of the Rothschild Foundation’s annual lectures last night, given by Demis Hassabis, a wunderkind of the artificial intelligence world, early chess champion, inventor of Theme Park, an internationally important computer game, when he was 17, before reading computer science in Cambridge and doing a PhD. on cognitive neuroscience. He talked about how far the new generation of computers has developed creativity, based on the contrast between the first generation computer which was able to beat a world champion at chess and the next generation which could develop unexpected and counter-intuitive moves at Go, a more complicated game not susceptible to mere mechanical memory of moves. He went on to show the way artificial intelligence can be applied to medicine – easy to see – and art – maybe less obvious, because art is not the product of any underlying systematic order. But he certainly made it clear that the world is going to change as machines radically outpace the capabilities of humans in so many spheres.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
As an artist inspired by biotechnologies and medicine I so enjoyed reading this so thank you for posting. New technologies such as Ai are indeed changing the face of medicine in entering mainstream healthcare. It’s interesting where genome editing and Ai collide. Living in the genomic era and developing an understanding of the meaning of new technologies, in particular the implications of CRISPR recently gave rise to it being instrumental in my concept of The Viral Sublime as a new category and extension to existing knowledge on the Sublime. The minds of those such as Demis Hassabis are indeed remarkable!