?E! #28 - Reel Philosophy: The Thinking Game — Who Do You Trust to Build the Future?

Who do you trust to build the future, and does their character actually matter?

Chirag and Sunay unpack "The Thinking Game," a documentary following Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis from chess prodigy to Nobel Prize winner. The film raises a question it doesn't fully answer: when the people building the most powerful technology in history are also deciding how it gets used, what safeguards actually work? The conversation covers ethics officers, regulation vs. innovation, and why social media already disproved the "let the public self-correct" theory.

Key Takeaways:

• The character of AI's builders matters, but character alone has never been enough to protect society from powerful technology
• Social media already proved that public transparency doesn't automatically lead to self-correction
• Regulation and innovation aren't the zero-sum trade-off the industry claims — healthcare manages both
• Ethics officers exist in Canadian banks since 2008 but are largely absent from American tech companies
• Demis Hassabis solved protein folding and open-sourced it, showing what happens when purpose drives the builder

Chapters:
0:00 Intro: The Thinking Game
2:24 The Leaders Behind Our AI Tools
4:35 Can Public Scrutiny Keep AI Safe?
7:16 Why Self-Regulation Isn't Enough
9:29 The Case for Ethics Officers (and Resident Philosophers)
13:21 Does Regulation Kill Innovation?
18:14 What AI Can Learn from Healthcare
22:31 Can Government Keep Up?
24:36 Demis Hassabis: A Life Built on Purpose
27:20 "Solve All of Them" — Then Give It Away
30:17 From AlphaGo to AlphaZero: Learning from Scratch
34:16 The Gap Between Using AI and Understanding It
36:17 When No One Knows How the Machines Work
39:57 Energy, Compute, and the Rate Limiter
42:25 Humanity Is Getting Worse at Coordination
46:23 Manhattan Project Parallels
48:59 Does the Builder Matter?

Resources & Links:

• The Thinking Game (documentary) — directed by Greg Kohs
• Google DeepMind
• AlphaFold — the protein structure prediction tool discussed in the episode
• Superagency by Reid Hoffman — the book Chirag references on AI optimism
• Amanda Askell, Anthropic's Resident Philosopher — the philosopher role discussed in the episode
• Dwarkesh Podcast: Elon Musk Interview — the interview Chirag references on data centers in space

Listen & subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube