28th April, 7:30pm - Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine

Backstory, 71 Balham High Rd, SW12 9AP

Award winning author Sebastian Mallaby joins us to talk about The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, a revelatory portrait of the visionary behind Google DeepMind, the race to control the future - and what it means to win.

About the book:

Long before the current obsession with AI, Demis Hassabis founded the path-breaking company DeepMind in order to pursue a single, audacious goal: the dream of artificial superintelligence, which would solve humanity’s hardest problems, change life and work as we know it, and perhaps even unlock the deepest mysteries of the Universe.

For the past three years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with him and his inner circle as well as detractors and rivals at other companies. The result is a revelation-packed
portrait of a singular mind and a historic reckoning with the AI revolution, a shift potentially more significant than any since the dawn of complex thought 70,000 years ago.
As Mallaby chronicles, DeepMind is locked in an arms race with Silicon Valley competitors to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby become the keeper of humanity’s future. Yet this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis has remained in Britain, and unlike his rivals, his aims are not wealth and power but scientific enlightenment. Like them, however, he is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. He aims to control the technology, but the technology may ultimately control him – and humanity writ large.

Tickets Available:

Ticket only - £15 (This ticket does not include a copy of the book. You can decide to buy a copy on the night, but this will be charged in addition, at the full price of the book.)

Ticket & book  (RRP £30) - £35 (To collect on the night.)