The topic of A.I. is something to provoke a lot of discussion. Some will regard it as a revolutionary breakthrough in technology. Others see it as a threat that devalues human abilities. The documentary The Thinking Game gives an insight into A.I. as navigated by one of its biggest pioneers.
The film begins with a look at Demis Hassabis: the British CEO of the technology company AlphaGo. It shows of his current working with A.I. and also his intrigue of developing AGI: Artificial General Intelligence. As we learn more about attempts to develop AGI, which is like A.I. but appears closer in developing the feelings similar to that of humans, we are introduced to Hassabis and his intrigue with the human mind. Hassabis was born to a Greek-Cypriot father and a Singaporean-Chinese mother in 1976. He grew up in East London and his above-average intelligence was noticed as he developed a love for chess. Soon he became the second-ranked chess player in the world for his age range and a chess master at 13.
Everything changed one day during a chess tournament he played in. It was a game when he was thirteen that he lost and he was out of the tournament. He was sad about it, but did not leave the playing area. While sitting, it got him thinking of all these people around him still playing and all the brain power going on. It got him thinking of a human’s brain power. Are there any limits to what human thinking can solve? Soon Hassabis bought a computer with his chess winnings and learned programming from books. One day, he won a contest to win a job at a video game company: Bullfrog Productions. Soon he helped with Bullfrog’s work and invented a game of his own: Theme park.
Theme Park became a hit and helped him make enough money to attend Queen’s College at Cambridge. College was difficult because he wanted to study artificial intelligence and he was chastised by the professors about it. He did graduate from Queens College with a Computer Science Tripos. He also went to the University College London where he achieved a PhD in Neuroscience. In between and after his stints at college, he continued his work in video games and programming going from Lionhead Studios to founding his own game studios Elixir. His fascination with the human mind never left him. He felt that through computers, he can create something with artificial intelligence that can even tap into human emotions. Something commonly referred to as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.
In 2010, Hassabis and his colleagues Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman created the artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind. The activity on artificial intelligence at DeepMind started when Hassabis worked ways to get a computer to play old video games from the 1970’s and 1980’s. The AI system was taught nothing of the game and would have to learn by constant play. Over time, the A.I.’s learning system worked and they would master the games. Interest in DeepMind grew and it attracted investors like Elon Musk and would be owned by Google from 2013 to 2014. Then in late-2015, they created AlphaGo: a computerized version of the game Go with A.I. as the opponent. They would soon challenge the world’s highest-ranked Go players to matches and win.
For DeepMind, it was enough to declare victory. For someone like Demis Hassabis, it wasn’t enough. Hassabis has a lot of ambitions on his mind. One of which was protein folding. Solving the problem can help with solving Alzheimer’s, dementia and developing new drugs. Hassabis and his colleagues would create the program AlphaFold to perform the predictions of protein structures. For years, it was all trial and error. As one of the colleagues put it, they were the best in the world at it but they were awful. Then during the pandemic while everyone had to isolate and work at home, the code was cracked. It doesn’t end there for Hassabis as it appears he wants to crack every uncracked code that’s out there.
A.I. and A.G.I. are two things that are admired for what they do and despised for what they do. Through computer technology, they’re able to solve a lot of problems human’s either can’t solve or can’t solve fast enough. Because of that, many people see this as a threat to humanity, especially in terms of employment and the constant automating of jobs. Even Hassabis himself has been both praised for his discoveries and achievements and vilified by some in aiding something that many feel devalues human abilities. There are many people from his co-workers to journalists to his former professors that ask the big question when will it stop? Yet Hassabis comes across as the type who doesn’t want to stop until everything’s all solved.
This film actually spends more time focusing on Hassabis and his accomplishments than on the subjects of A.I. and A.G.I. The film showcases Hassabis as someone who many feel deserves the praise equal to that of other computer technology pioneers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Sometimes the film shows Hassabis as having acclaim ‘unsung’ compared to the two. The film also shows Hassabis as one of those child geniuses who was able to find a way to make better use of his brain than winning chess tournaments. It does show Hassabis to display a lot of genius traits both in action and personality but it doesn’t show him to be as much of an eccentric like many other famous geniuses.
The film is able to mesh Hassabis’ life story of how he went from a chess prodigy to being on the forefront of A.I. development with the current developments of A.G.I. his current lab. It chronicles his achievements while it also shows how workers in his lab are working to perfect his A.G.I. technologies to match human feelings and emotions. It doesn’t spend a lot of time on the news stories involving his lab and of A.I. research. It also spends a small amount of time on people who feel threatened by the latest wave of A.I. technologies. Especially the actors who went on strike last year. The film does leave out the times Hassabis has focused on the topic of existential risk from A.I. which Hassabis has spoken out and warned against. Hassabis has even stated the risk from extinction from A.I. is as much worthy of concern as nuclear war or another pandemic, but there’s no mention of it in the film here.
It’s interesting that this documentary comes out in the very year Hassabis and his AlphaFold partner John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the very protein structure prediction they were experimenting on in this documentary. The documentary does make it interesting how meshing games with work appears to be Demis’ life. He calls chess a good thinking game as a child, does game development as a teenager and young adult, uses A.I. to challenge people at chess, then using A. I. to challenge the world’s best Go players, to using A.I. to work protein structures. It seems like everything Demis has worked on in his lifetime appears to be another ‘thinking game.’ Leaving the film, maybe the film shows that science itself in all of its trials, errors and experimentations has always been a ‘thinking game.’
Director Greg Kohs delivers a documentary some could find intriguing or some could find to be missing information. It does a good job in getting us to see Demis’ achievements in a topic that has many people intrigued in. It can also lead people to scratch their head about what this film is about. Is it about Demis? Is it about A.I. or A.G.I.? Is it about his inventions and contributions? Is it about a person we’re to blame for what threatens us now? Is it even the world through Demis’ eyes? Or even is it about science as a whole with all the many failures before the successes?
The Thinking Game is an ambiguous documentary that is as much about A. I. evolving over the decades as it’s a biographical film of Demis Hassabis. It doesn’t focus too much on the controversies of A.I. Instead it focuses on Demis’ intrigue into A.I. and how it would greatly pave the way to what we have now. Whether it rightly or wrongly glorifies Hassabis, that’s up for the viewer to decide.
Jon The Blogcentric 