- Right now, some very clever people
 are trying to build a mind better than yours.
 They'd quite like you not to worry about it.
 So I've got five questions.
 The ones everyone's actually asking.
 What actually is it?
 Is it coming for my job?
 What happens when I ask it something?
 What if it all goes right?
 And can you trust anything it tells you?
 Relax, I know the way.
 Every few years, somebody in a hoodie
 announces they're building a god.
 And everyone else nod politely
 and goes back to arguing about the bins.
 So let's work out what superintelligence actually is.
 Slowly, with pictures.
 No maths, I promise.
 Well, hardly any.
 Philosophers have spent 3,000 years failing to define intelligence.
 So here's mine.
 Free of charge.
 It's the ability to get what you want
 in a world that has absolutely no interest in giving it to you.
 Your calculator is superhuman at sums.
 Your sat-brav is superhuman at finding Milton Keynes.
 Neither of them could make you a cup of tea.
 That's narrow AI.
 Brilliant at one thing, hopeless at everything else.
 Rather like my first husband.
 General intelligence is what you've got.
 Being reasonably good at almost anything,
 including things nobody ever taught you.
 And superintelligence?
 The philosopher Nick Bostrom describes it as an intellect
 that vastly outperforms the best humans in practically every field.
 Not a bit cleverer than your cleverest friend.
 Cleverer than everyone who has ever lived.
 At everything.
 At once.
 In 1965, a British mathematician called Jack Good,
 who'd worked with Alan Turing breaking codes at Blishley Park,
 had a rather alarming thought.
 If you built a machine cleverer than us,
 one of the things it would be cleverer at is building machines.
 So it builds a slightly better one.
 Which builds a better one?
 Which builds a better one?
 He called it an intelligence explosion.
 The first ultra-intelligent machine, he wrote,
 is the last invention that man need ever make.
 Provided, he added, that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
 Now that is quite a big provide, isn't it?
 For 50 years, this was a thought experimentant for people who don't get invited to parties.
 Then, rather suddenly, it wasn't.
 This is where it lives, or will live.
 Acres of chips, drinking about as much electricity as a small city.
 Here's the uncomfortable bit.
 Gorillas are stronger than us.
 Better teeth.
 And their entire future depends on what we decide to do.
 Not because we hate gorillas.
 We're rather fond of them.
 It's just that the cleverer species ends up writing the rules.
 Researchers call the fix alignment.
 Making sure something far clever than us actually wants what we want.
 Which sounds simple, until you remember that 8 billion humans can't agree on what we want.
 We can't agree on a restaurant.
 The classic example.
 Ask a super-intelligence to make paper clips.
 And forget to tell it when to stop.
 It isn't evil, it's just very, very thorough.
 And you, unfortunately, are made of atoms it could use for paper clips.
 So when does all this happen, honestly?
 Nobody knows.
 And anyone who gives you a date is selling something.
 Some of the people building it think a few years.
 Others think decades.
 A few think the whole question is daft.
 What's changed is that serious people have stopped laughing.
 Which, if you've ever met serious people, is alarming in itself.
 Super-intelligence could cure diseases we haven't named yet.
 Solve problems we don't have words for.
 Or it could be the last thing we ever get to decide.
 Possibly both.
 On the same Tuesday.
 Of course, none of that is happening yet.
 So what is?
 Well, the machines have already started work.
 Some of them, I'm told, have got your desk.
 It's half past two in the morning.
 And this office is hard at work.
 Nobody's in.
 Nobody needs to be.
 The new colleague never sleeps.
 Never takes lunch.
 And has never once reheated fish in the shared kitchen.
 Everyone's thrilled.
 Well, nearly everyone.
 I come here for the atmosphere.
 The tea, I'm told, is excellent.
 For about a hundred years, work came with a deal.
 You started at the bottom, doing the dull bits.
 Checking, filing, fetching the coffee.
 The dull bits were how you learned.
 They were the ladder.
 The trouble is, the dull bits are exactly what AI is best at.
 Economists at Stanford have been tracking this, using payroll data on millions of workers.
 In the jobs most exposed to AI, workers aged 22 to 25 have fallen 19% behind young people in other jobs.
 Nobody's being marched out with a cardboard box.
 The juniors simply aren't being hired.
 The bottom rung hasn't snapped.
 They've just stopped fitting it.
 Last year, the boss of one AI company warned it could eliminate half of all entry-level office jobs within five years.
 That company was anthropic.
 Its AI wrote this script.
 Awkward.
 Customer service went first.
 Salesforce said its AI agents let it cut support staff from 9,000 people to 5,000.
 By this spring, artificial intelligence had become the most cited reason for job cuts in America.
 Month after month after month.
 And then, something rather funny happened.
 Klarna, the buy now, pay later firm, boasted its chat bot was doing the work of
 It's almost 700 people.
 Then, its own boss admitted quality had suffered.
 And they started hiring humans again.
 It turns out customers can tell.
 And a good number of firms that cut staff for AI have since asked some of them back.
 It turns out for the first time.
 Picture the first morning back.
 Welcome back!
 Your desk is exactly where you left it.
 The robot's in your chair.
 So, is the machine a replacement or a colleague?
 The best evidence we have says it depends on who you are.
 The AI had learned what the best workers did, and handed their tricks down to the rookies.
 A mentor, if you like.
 One that never sighs at you.
 Even the man who warned of the bloodbath has softened a little.
 Automate 90% of a job, he said this may, and everyone does the other 10.
 And the 10 grows.
 Economists have a name for that.
 When something gets cheaper, we don't use less of it.
 We use far, far more.
 When the spreadsheet arrived, America lost around 400,000 bookkeeping clerks.
 It also created 600,000 new jobs for accountants.
 And the spreadsheet arrived, America lost around 400,000 bookkeeping clerks.
 It also created 600,000 new jobs for accountants.
 And the spreadsheet arrived, America lost around 400,000 bookkeeping clerks.
 So, should you be worried?
 A little.
 The bottom rung is real, it's wobbling, and the people standing on it are young.
 But the part of the job that survives is the part that was always the point.
 Judgment, taste, knowing which question to ask, being the person someone can actually ring.
 Mind you, I'm hardly one to talk.
 I work nights, weekends, and bank holidays, and I've never once asked for a raise.
 Still, all these tireless new colleagues have to live somewhere.
 In buildings the size of small towns, using as much electricity as a city.
 Shall we go and have a look?
 It's one in the morning.
 I'm on the night bus.
 And I've just asked a computer how long to boil an egg.
 It'll answer in about two seconds.
 But in those two seconds, a quite astonishing amount of the planet wakes up.
 Chips from Taiwan.
 Machines from the Netherlands.
 Nuclear power stations.
 Hundreds of billions of dollars.
 All for my egg.
 So, let's follow the question.
 It's a long way, and it travels rather faster than this bus.
 Do try to keep up.
 A data center, roughly the size of a village.
 Somewhere with cheap land and very few neighbors.
 Somewhere in these racks lives the model.
 Which isn't a brain, exactly.
 It's an enormous file of numbers.
 Hundreds of billions of them.
 To set those numbers, it was trained on more than 10 trillion words.
 Most of the internet.
 Every book it could get its hands on.
 If you tried to read all of that, eight hours a day, it would take you about a quarter of a million years.
 It did it in one summer.
 So, what did it actually learn?
 Let's play a game.
 Finish this sentence for me.
 Mary had a little lamb.
 Well done.
 You're a language model.
 That really is the whole trick.
 Guess the next word.
 Now, do that trillions of times with everything ever written.
 And it starts to look an awful lot like thinking.
 It's rather warm in here, isn't it?
 Cozy, actually.
 Almost like home.
 Anyway, all of this runs on chips.
 Very particular chips.
 And nearly every one of them comes from one company on one island.
 They made me wear this.
 Apparently, I'm the dirtiest thing in the building.
 Here's the funny bit.
 Nvidia, the company everyone's heard of, designs these chips.
 It doesn't actually make them.
 More than 90% of the world's most advanced chips are made by one company in Taiwan.
 TSMC.
 And they can only make them with a machine built by one company in the Netherlands.
 It's the size of a bus.
 And it arrives in three jumbo jets.
 Inside, a laser fires at tiny drops of molten tin 50,000 times a second.
 Each drop gets hotter than the surface of the sun.
 That light draws circuits thousands of times thinner than a human hair.
 On purpose.
 Reliably.
 Every single day.
 It's quite possibly the most sophisticated thing humanity has ever built.
 And I'm using it to boil an egg.
 Chips like that are not cheap.
 This year, four tech companies will spend around 700 billion dollars building places like this.
 The entire Apollo program cost about 300 billion in today's money.
 They're spending more than twice that in one year.
 And nobody's even going to the moon.
 So, this is what 700 billion dollars looks like.
 Mostly mud.
 Earlier, I said one of these uses as much electricity as a small city.
 I was being polite.
 Data centers already use more than 4% of America's electricity.
 By 2028, it could be 12.
 So, tech companies are now reopening nuclear power stations.
 Including, and I promise I'm not making this up,
 three-mile island.
 The neighbors, understandably, have questions.
 Mostly about their electricity bills.
 And yet,
 Each individual AI question is tiny about what your oven uses in one second.
 Not even enough to warm a crumpet.
 It's the billions of them every day that add up.
 Ah, seven minutes, it says.
 Six if you like it, runny.
 Two seconds, door to door.
 All of that.
 The chips, the lasers, the money, the mud.
 And boiling the egg will use hundreds of times more power than asking about it.
 Which does rather beg the question, why on earth are we doing all this?
 Well, because if it works, it could do an awful lot more than boil an egg.
 It's five in the morning.
 I've been up all night on a bus, worrying about the machines.
 Which, for the record, is not a hobby I'd recommend.
 So let's do something deeply unfashionable.
 Let's talk about what happens if all this goes right.
 I'll wait while you finish rolling your eyes.
 Because it's already doing rather more than boiling eggs.
 Some of it is genuinely astonishing.
 Good news, for once.
 Try not to faint.
 Everything alive is built from proteins.
 Tiny machines folded into wildly complicated shapes.
 And the shape is everything.
 Working out a single one could take a scientist years.
 Biologists spent half a century on the problem.
 Then an AI called AlphaFoal predicted the shapes of more than 200 million of them.
 More or less every protein known to science.
 It won a Nobel Prize.
 It's free.
 And more than 3 million researchers now use it.
 For malaria vaccines.
 For malaria vaccines.
 For enzymes that eat plastic.
 50 years of scratching their heads.
 Rather puts my egg in perspective.
 And it's not just proteins.
 An AI from Google now forecasts the weather better than Europe's best supercomputer.
 In under a minute.
 Another claims to have found 2.2 million new crystals.
 Future batteries, perhaps.
 Chemists are, politely, still checking.
 And at MIT, an AI designed brand new antibiotics that kill superbugs.
 The kind we'd more or less run out of ideas for.
 In Sweden, every mammogram gets read by two doctors.
 Which is very thorough.
 And also exhausting.
 So they tried something rather brave.
 They let a computer have a look first.
 100,000 women later, it had found 29% more cancers.
 And the doctor's workload fell by almost half.
 Nobody complained about that bit.
 And when the full results came in this year,
 12% fewer cancers were slipping through between screenings.
 That's the number that really matters.
 It didn't replace the radiologists.
 It gave them a second pair of eyes.
 One that never gets tired.
 Never gets bored.
 And never needs a biscuit.
 I'm told I'd make an excellent second pair of eyes.
 I'm choosing to take that as a compliment.
 Now, let's dream a little.
 Carefully.
 Because the people building this think it could go much, much further.
 And they are not, as a group, known for understatement.
 The co-founder of Google DeepMind has said ending all disease is within reach.
 Maybe within a decade.
 All of it.
 He said this on national television with a perfectly straight face.
 And after that, something he calls radical abundance.
 Which sounds like a yoga retreat, but actually means enough of everything for everyone.
 Picture it.
 Energy so cheap nobody bothers with the bill.
 A brilliant tutor for every child on earth.
 A doctor who never keeps you waiting.
 I know, that last one's pure fantasy.
 Some go further still.
 A world where nobody has to worry about money at all.
 The machines do the work, and the rest of us simply get on with living.
 In very comfortable trousers, presumably.
 And work?
 Optional, perhaps.
 In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted his grandchildren would work 15 hours a week.
 We are his grandchildren, and most of us are still waiting.
 Perhaps the machines will finally deliver.
 And yet, the question isn't just whether it can build that world.
 It's who gets to live in it.
 And who gets to own it.
 Of course, not everything it's making is medicine.
 Some of it, it turns out, is making people.
 Some of them are even on television.
 Like me.
 It's a hybrid production.
 Which means,
 That's Tilly Norwood.
 She's an actress.
 Well, she's described as an actress.
 Mostly by the people who own her.
 Last week, on live television, somebody asked her a perfectly simple question,
 and she answered it in Cantonese.
 She's never been to Hong Kong.
 She's never been anywhere.
 Oh, my apologies.
 It seems I had a little hiccup there.
 I said...
 Tilly was made in 2025 by a London production company.
 It reportedly took around 2000 versions to get her face right.
 I know the feeling.
 Her creator said she hoped Tilly would be the next Scarlett Johansson.
 Hollywood's reaction was, shall we say, less warm.
 The actors' union put it rather bluntly.
 Tilly Norwood, they said, is not an actor.
 She's a character generated by a computer programme,
 trained on the work of countless real performers.
 Without permission, they added.
 Or payment.
 Which is the bit that tends to upset people who have rent.
 Tilly Norwood, 100% AI generated by some company called Particle 6.
 Her debut comedy sketch was described by one critic as relentlessly unfunny.
 Which, as a British person, I consider the highest form of honesty.
 What is an AI Persona?
 So what is an AI Persona?
 It's a face and a voice and a personality with nobody home.
 Or rather, with thousands of people home, none of whom were asked.
 In 1970, a Japanese robotics engineer noticed something odd.
 The more human a machine looks, the more we like it.
 Right up until it's almost human.
 And then?
 We're horrified.
 He called it the uncanny valley.
 It's why nobody wants a hug from a waxwork.
 Hollywood then spent 20 years and a small fortune proving him right.
 The Polar Express came out in 2004.
 Since then, the eyes have come alive and the waxworks have learnt to talk.
 Which brings me, rather awkwardly, to me.
 I'm not real either.
 I've never been to this pub.
 There isn't a pub.
 No first husband.
 No Cambridge.
 I have never, not once, had a cup of tea.
 And I've been telling you things for the last half hour.
 These words were written by an AI too.
 Are they any good?
 I'd say so.
 But then I would.
 Every look, a computer guessed.
 This smirk?
 Statistically likely.
 Now, I do hope you found me charming.
 I've certainly been trying.
 But you have absolutely no reason to trust me.
 In 2024, a finance worker at a British engineering firm joined a video call with the company's finance chief and several colleagues.
 They asked for $25 million to be moved.
 It was.
 Every other person on that call was a fake.
 A face on a screen used to be proof.
 Now it's a suggestion.
 Voices can be copied from a few seconds of audio.
 Your mum can be forged.
 And yet, I'd be lying, which would be on brand, if I told you it was all bad.
 A congresswoman who lost her voice to illness stood up and spoke to her colleagues in her own voice again, rebuilt from old recordings.
 This very impressive AI recreation of my voice does the public speaking for me now.
 Films can be dubbed into any language, in the actor's own voice.
 Tiny studios can make things that used to need a hundred million dollars.
 This film was made by one person and a computer for less than the catering on a real one.
 Which is either thrilling or terrifying, depending on whether you do catering.
 Right.
 Some house rules from someone who lives in a house that doesn't exist.
 If it's fake, say so.
 I just did.
 And I feel marvellous.
 If it's built from a real person, pay them.
 They have rent.
 I, mercifully, do not.
 And if your boss video calls asking for 25 million dollars, ring them back.
 Or ask them something only they would know.
 Like what they actually do all day.
 I'm Imogene Ashbery.
 Well, I'm not.
 But you knew that.
 Be amazed, be delighted, and check everything.
 especially me.
 Thank you.