In my belated quest to develop a faint sense of what AI is doing, I have just read Sebastian Mallaby’s book The Infinity Machine, about the greatest British AI wizard, Demis Hassabis, boss of DeepMind. The numerous passages I did not understand are my fault, not Mallaby’s. The book is admirably lucid. All I can record, which may slightly help others dipping their toes in the shallow end, is two contradictory impressions. The first is of foreboding. When thinking about AI, we are talking as much about its human creators as about the machines themselves. These creators are almost all men (there are only four women in the book’s entire index), and a certain type of man at that. They resemble clever boys – especially American clever boys, even when they are not actually American. (Mallaby, though British, writes his British-published book in American throughout.) They tend to have come into the world of AI via games – chess, Go, video games, and ones I have never heard of called things like Pong. They love go-karting. Mallaby’s description of the male type (specifically, Mustafa ‘Moose’ Suleyman) is ‘a brash and brilliant autodidact’. Such men are mostly ahistorical and inclined to seek perfect solutions. Hassabis, though clearly one of the humane ones, says he wants to ‘assemble a council of the hundred wisest people from all corners of the Earth’, not seeing the utter unwisdom of such utopian thought. Sam Altman of Open AI recently spoke of bringing up his surrogate son by his same-sex marriage,........

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