‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind | AI (artificial intelligence)
Publish Date: 2026-06-30 00:00:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.
Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls “enthusiastic” rock climbing. The eldest son of a Greek management professor and a British documentary maker, Gabriel split his time between teaching and international development work. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John’s College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of “yuppie ethics” and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn’t there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon.
DeepMind, meanwhile, was the world’s leading AI research lab. In part, this was because it had the financial and computational backing of Google, which had bought the company in 2014 for $650m. In part, it was because DeepMind had recently shown it could put those resources to stunning use. In Seoul, in 2016, a DeepMind system called AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go champion, in a five-game match. The victory was significant not least because of Go’s legendary complexity; the game has more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe.
Thanks to the fuss around AlphaGo, Gabriel was aware of DeepMind. Still, he found his friend’s suggestion puzzling: why did a company that made game-playing robots need an ethicist? The answer, as he soon learned, was that the company had its sights set much higher than Go. DeepMind was founded in 2010 by three men – Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman – who believed that it must be possible to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI. By this they meant computer systems that could…
