World Economic Forum/Gabriel Lado
Cambridge students had a chance to submit questions to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis earlier this year. They wanted to know how they should focus their time in the age of AI.
His advice? Spend your time “learning to learn.”
“I think really understanding — using the time you have as an undergraduate to understand yourself better, and how you learn best,” Hassabis said in an interview at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Adaptability is key, he added, “how to pick up new material really quickly and getting adept at that.”
The AI executive said he believes that today’s college students will be entering a world where the only predictable factor is “an incredible amount of disruption and change,” all due to developing technologies. He also offered his view on which industries he expected to grow.
“I would say especially AI, but also VR, AR, you know, quantum computing,” he said. “All of these things are sort of looking like they’re gonna be promising in the next five to 10 years.”
Anytime there is change, he added, there is also “huge” opportunity.
“I think we’re about to enter a period like that, perhaps like in the nineties when we were graduating, you know, it was the internet, and mobile, and gaming,” Hassabis said. “I think we’re in another one of those eras. So they’re very exciting, but you’ve gotta be very nimble and embrace the new technologies that are coming down the line.”
Hassabis said students should focus on the fundamentals. Though there’s always likely to be a new fad, it’s better to avoid becoming distracted by things that could be “in fashion today, but out of fashion tomorrow.”
“I remember my favorite topics were things like computation theory and information theory, you know, studying things like Turing machines,” Hassabis said. “That stayed with me for my whole career, really. So, I like the kind of mathematical underpinnings and a lot of the traditional, foundational work.”
Students shouldn’t neglect their passions, either, he added. By the time they’re done with school, Hassabis said graduates should be able to “combine” deep knowledge of their interests with the core skills they’ve developed.
“In your spare time, you should be probably experimenting with whatever your passionate area is,” Hassabis said. “In my case, it would be AI. With all the tools that are coming out — and a lot of it’s very accessible and open source and so on — so that you really are up to speed with the absolute latest when you graduate.”
As for graduate students, Hassabis suggested they develop expertise across a variety of fields. If they’re learning about AI, for instance, they should also know where best to apply it.
“I feel like multidisciplinary research is really gonna come to the fore in the next sort of decade,” he said.
There’s likely to be a lot of “low-hanging fruit” where artificial intelligence and STEM fields intersect, he added, so it’s important to know enough about both your subject areas to understand what the “right questions” are — as asking them could lead to breakthroughs.
“Picking the question is about having this sort of taste or smell, if you like, of intuition, of, ‘What is the right problem?’ Is it the right time to tackle that problem, as well?” Hassabis said. “Because timing can be really difficult. You don’t want to really be 50 years ahead of your time.”
And though Hassabis said you can’t really train that sixth sense, he says you can keep an open mind, and remain ready to jump at the opportunities when they do appear.
“They can come up from anywhere,” he said. “So that kind of goes with being multidisciplinary, exposing yourself to a wide range of ideas.”
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