Will the world of AI be flashier and more frivolous than the world of humans?
Recently, in an interview with The Guardian, the CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis made quite a striking and confident statement: the AI revolution might turn out to be a hundred times larger than the Industrial Revolution. That is more than a sound bite. It is a prediction--and made by a man who has already transformed the science with the help of artificial intelligence.
DeepMind boasts a Nobel Prize-winning scientist-Hassabis is a former child prodigy-and groundbreaking research on artificial intelligence. When he speaks about the future folks will listen.
What does it actually translate to the world when, arguably, one of the most well-established proponents of Chinese thought in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) believes we have now reached the verge of the most significant revolution in human history?
Unpacking it.
Video Games to Nobel Prizes
The story of Demis Hassabis starts with computers, in fact, in his bedroom in an attic.
He designed the successful simulation game Theme Park when he was only 17 years of age and this game became very popular during the 1990s. And even at the time, he was instilling simple concepts of AI in the logic of the games, long before the term machine learning became popular.
In 2010, years later, Hassabis co-founded DeepMind together with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman (now head of Microsoft AI division). Their goal was ambitious: they aimed to construct artificial general intelligence (AGI) which would involve the creation of the most advanced AI systems whose capabilities would include all the features of human cognition.
Only four years after its establishment, Google purchased DeepMind at the price of \$461 million. It is not only another research arm to the tech giant; the purchase is the bet on the AI revolution.
And DeepMind did.
In 2024, AlphaFold, DeepMinds AI model, predicted the folds of more than 200 million proteins including many previously unseen by science, earned Hassabis the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This was a breakthrough that broke traditional boundaries in biology and provided drug developers globally, with a new drug discovery and disease pathology tool.
To summarize, it was not AI that assisted but the more accurate phrase is that it was leading.
Even a More Than Tenfold Larger Revolution than the Industrial One?
Hassabis is not exaggerating when he discusses how the scope of the AI revolution is 10 times the scope of the Industrial Revolution.
The industrial revolution took the physical labor to the machine level. It introduced machines to the factory and revolutionized the agriculture, transport and economics.
The AI revolution, though, is mechanizing thought: the thought itself, the process of learning, reasoning and creating. It is not this time replacing arms and legs. It concerns enhancing, and possibly out-smarting, human brains.
Consider it:
- Code writting algorithms that are more efficient than low-level developers.
- Artificial intelligence that can pass examinations to become a medical professional.
- Computers that paint pictures, authored books, and can forecast the structure of proteins within seconds.
Assuming that the Industrial Revolution was a decades-long process of transforming the society, the AI revolution is happening in years--not months.
And we are not even getting started.
Next 10 Years/AGI?
During the interview, Hassabis suggested that the emergence of artificial general intelligence, meaning AI, that would be able to think, reason and learn similarly to how human beings can would likely come as soon as within five to ten years.
That is an extreme shift of time. Most of the professionals thought that AGI would be something to look forward to in the future generation and not in the current generation.
In the case that Hassabis is correct, we are on the cusp of an age when AI does not merely aid us, but competes, cooperates and co-exists with us in decision-making, creativity and logic.
This will not be silent change. AI revolution is going to affect all areas such as: education, law, healthcare, journalism, security, and art. It will generate absolutely new professional specialties and scour off others.
Transitioning Won’t Be Easy
Hassabis himself admits the challenge of the move to be made.
The AI revolution is not coming gradually as was the case in the industrial revolution, but rather quickly, and in a global, digitalized world. Its modifications are initially intangible and initially manifest as a more intelligent chatbot, a more efficient recommendation engine, or another research assistant that is quicker.
Yet the changes at the base have been huge:
- Privacy and ownership of data issues
- Releasing jobs and redeploying skills
- Ethics of autonomous systems
- Equilibrium of forces among superextremes of AI
And this time, it is not the steam engines that bring change--algorithms are the instruments of change. Algorithms created by just a few companies, and potentially using, billions.
What Now?
That is to say that in the event the AI revolution truly will be ten times as large as the Industrial Revolution the next decade may well be the most disruptive in human history.
However, disruption is not a bad thing. It is power. The question is what we do with it.
That means:
- Governments will have to develop flexible, considerate policies that strike a balance between innovation and protection of the masses.
- Companies have to expect automation and AI incorporation, as well as completely new competitive environments.
- People should be reskilled, be more creative on their occupation, and be willing to learn throughout their life.
And at the center of this it all is the likes of Hassabis people with a vision looking beyond predictions into the future but creating it.
