Demis Hassabis, Father of Google's Artificial Intelligence

Author's Preface

Kim Kyung-ran, Kim Kyung-jin

It was the spring of 2016 in Seoul when I first learned of Demis Hassabis. News poured in that AI had defeated a human on the Go board displayed on screen, and the world watched that moment with a mixture of excitement and unease.

I felt the same way. But after the excitement subsided, I noticed one question that would not leave my mind: "Why did this man do this?"

If victory itself had been the goal, he would have stopped after AlphaGo. But Hassabis did not stop. From the Go board to the laboratory, from the laboratory to the world. His gaze was always fixed on the next problem.

Decades of chess intuition, experience in game development, and discoveries in neuroscience all pointed in a single direction, and at the end of that direction lay problems humanity had long failed to solve. I am someone who has walked the path of education and policy. I am also someone who has long asked not how technology works, but what it means for society and for people.

That question is what drove me to write this book. I wanted to convey not the sophistication of algorithms, but the weight of one person's obsession, carried over forty years. In October 2024, when the phone rang from Stockholm, Hassabis said his mind "went completely blank."

It was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It was the moment a scientific achievement accomplished not in a laboratory but in front of a computer ascended to the highest seat in the history of science. That single phone call told me why this book needed to come out now.

AI is already among us. Yet we still do not properly understand it. I hope this book can broaden that understanding, even slightly. For those who fear technology, for those excited by it, and for those somewhere in between, quietly wrestling with the question.

The story begins in a small house in north London, at the moment a four-year-old boy first picked up a chess piece. Kim Kyung-ran, Kim Kyung-jin