David had an addiction. Ever since he was a kid, he had spent countless hours of his life on the internet searching for naked photos of women and videos of them having sex. He wasn’t happy about how much time he spent looking for online pornography, but he couldn’t stop. …
Read More »Marie Kondo and the Manhattan Project
Stan Ulam knew he was moving to New Mexico, but he didn’t know exactly why. Ulam was a Polish-born mathematician—and later, physicist—who first came to the United States in the late 1930s. In 1943, after Ulam had obtained American citizenship and a job at the University of Wisconsin, his colleague …
Read More »AI Can Be an Extraordinary Force for Good—if It’s Contained
In a quaint Regency-era office overlooking London’s Russell Square, I cofounded a company called DeepMind with two friends, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in the summer of 2010. Our goal, one that still feels as ambitious and crazy and hopeful as it did back then, was to replicate the very …
Read More »The Aftermath of a 'Miracle Cure' for a Rare Cancer
You really can't understand all the excitement surrounding personalized medicine without knowing a little bit about Gleevec. And once you know the full story of Gleevec, you really can’t help but see much of that excitement as wild and even dangerous exaggeration. Personalized medicine (sometimes it’s also called “precision medicine”) …
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