'A golden era': This top CEO predicts AI-powered humans will begin to 'colonise' the galaxy in just...

Demis Hassabis, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Google DeepMind, has predicted that humans will be able to "colonise" the galaxy starting in just about five years from now. DeepMind is the artificial intelligence (AI) research wing of the California-headquartered tech giant. "If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era," 48-year-old Hassabis, who is a 2024 Nobel Prize laureate, said in a recent interview.

'Maximum flourishing'
Referring to a human level of AI, also called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Hassabis told WIRED, "AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world, curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources."
"If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonise the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030," the UK-born researcher added.

Hassabis adds a caveat
Hassabis, however, stated he was not sure if our society was yet ready for the dramatic progress in AI tech. "It's (AGI) coming, either way it's coming very soon and I'm not sure society's quite ready for that yet," he told the publication. "And we need to think that through and also think about these issues that I talked about earlier, to do with the controllability of these systems and also the access to these systems and ensuring that all goes well."

Calls for watchdog
Keeping in mind the perils of this rapidly-evolving tech, Hassabis has called for the setting up of an umbrella body to oversee AGI's development. "I would advocate for a kind of CERN for AGI, and by that, I mean a kind of international research-focused, high-end collaboration on the frontiers of AGI development to try and make that as safe as possible," he said in the same interview.