This same pattern is very likely to be repeated in every field AI touches. That generations of human wisdom, earned by hard experience, may be about to be wiped out is a fairly depressing thought. It’s not enough that robots are going to take our jobs, they’re going to make us look like fools while doing it. But Hassabis tells me that, on the contrary, he sees potential for AI to unleash a golden age of human creativity.

Take Go again. Hassabis says it’s now clear that the level of human play had reached a kind of plateau. Why? Because those learning the game falsely assumed that with more than 2,500 years of experience playing the game, every strategy had been tried and the rules of thumb accurately distilled this history. Top players, he says, weren’t likely to experiment with wild new strategies, because — even subconsciously — they wouldn’t want to risk losing games and prestige if that experimentation failed.