DeepMind CEO says we have little time to prepare for a 'new human era'

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said a more advanced AI — artificial general intelligence, able to perform cognitive tasks at or beyond human levels — is a few years away. "Maybe 2030, plus or minus a year," he said, calling it "such an enormous transformative technology; it's gonna effectively be a new human era," and likening its arrival to the singularity.

He warned society has a narrow window to prepare and urged humanities and STEM students to adapt and "lean in" to the technology. "Society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means," he said. "The future, in my view, is still to be written, but these next few years are going to be very critical as to which way that will go and how we collectively want that to look like." Hassabis added that some peers are being "way too certain" about their predictions.

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