Game can stimulate children’s creativity, says millionaire – 03/30/2024 – Tech

Parents who tear their hair out because their children spend hours on video games should, instead, encourage the creative use of technology, argues an English millionaire, who is a reference in artificial intelligence (AI), to the BBC.

Sir Demis Hassabis believes that children should be encouraged to create and program on the computer.

The co-founder and head of Google’s DeepMind has been playing chess and video games since childhood. Google bought his company for 400 million pounds sterling (R$2.5 billion) in 2014.

Demis told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that gaming helped him succeed.

“It’s important to feed the creative part, not just play,” he said.

“You never know where passions might take you, so I would just encourage parents to get their kids really passionate about things and then develop skills through that.”

He believes children need to be ready to adapt to what will be a “rapidly changing world” and “embrace that adaptability.”

Demis, a child chess prodigy, designed and programmed a multimillion-dollar game called “Theme Park” as a teenager, before attending Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

After graduating, he founded a video game company, completed a PhD in neuroscience, and co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010, which was later sold to Google.

On Thursday (28), he posted on X (the old Twitter) that he was “delighted” to receive a British knighthood for services to AI.

He told the BBC that the knighthood was recognition of what he and his team did to “seed the whole field and industry of AI” as well as their contribution to British life.

Demis said he had no regrets about selling DeepMind 10 years ago, as he considered Google to be the right company, with the computing power needed to take over the business.

“At the time, there was no capacity in the UK to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars that would be needed to take things on from a global perspective,” he said.

Using AI to imitate people in deepfake videos has caused concern, including the use of real-life people’s faces and voices in sex videos generated by the most advanced tools.

Christopher Doss, a researcher at the Rand Corporation, an international policy think tank, said detecting deepfake videos has turned into “an arms race between those who are trying to detect them and those who are trying to avoid detection.”

There are also concerns that the way AI is trained, using publicly available data, could lead to “algorithm bias.” This is a particular concern as it is implemented to automate decision-making, such as choosing relevant CVs for candidates for a particular job opening.

As this industry develops rapidly, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held the first AI safety conference in 2023, where he said he recognized there was “anxiety” about the impact new tools could have on work, but said they would increase productivity over time.

At this event, Demis signed a statement that says: “Mitigating the risk of extinction due to AI should be a global priority, along with other risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Speaking to BBC business editor Simon Jack, Demis said he did not see himself as Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the nuclear bomb.

He said the current generation of scientists are aware of the “warnings” about the power of technology and “the risks” involved if such power is not “managed correctly.”

He added that AI has an “unbelievable positive impact” that is “broader than the [poder] nuclear”.

The full interview (in English) with Sir Demis Hassabis, broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme, can be heard on the BBC Sounds app.

Text originally published here