I met a Nobel Prize winner who's building AGI.

You have 4 years left.

So, I was at Google I/O on Wednesday, the 20th of May. And I met Demis Hassabis.

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If you have never heard of him, you need a recap.

Age 4: started playing chess.

Age 13: reached master level in chess. That’s very high.

Age 17: helped create the video game Theme Park. A simulation.

Early 20s: studied computer science at Cambridge + a PhD in neuroscience.

Age 22: founded Elixir Studios, a video game company.

Age 34: co-founded DeepMind in 2010.

Age 37: DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for 600 million pounds. It’s considered the best and cheapest acquisition of all time, in history.

Age 39: led DeepMind when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go, the very best gamer of Go in the world, a game with about 10¹⁷⁰ possible board configurations, more than the number of atoms in the known universe.

Age 44: DeepMind released AlphaFold, used for predicting protein structures.

Age 48: won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold.

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DeepMind has a simple mission: "solve intelligence, then use that to solve everything else." And Demis told me AGI - also called Singularity - is 4 years away from us.

If he’s right, the work you do today looks almost nothing like the work you’ll be paid for in 2030. If he’s wrong, you have a few more years to get ready.

And if you are wondering what I mean by “the future of work”, I want to take my dad as an example.

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My dad worked in marketing in the 1980s.

And I studied marketing from 2017 to 2022 (but dropped out, sorry, dad).

My dad did hardcore marketing. Before spreadsheets. Before Google Forms. Before dashboards. Before any of the screens we have. He would:

1. Walk into the street. Stop strangers. Ask them what they thought of a product.

2. Write the answers in a notebook. Type them up later. Build the report.

3. By typing them up, I don’t mean on a computer. I mean, on paper, of course.

4. Draw mathematical functions by hand. BY HAND. With a pencil & compass.

5. Walk it to the meeting. Present it to people, humans, in actual chairs.

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Marketing was a social job.

Then computers arrived.

Spreadsheets. Google Forms. Social media. Google Ads. Got more analytical. Faster. Lonelier.

And now AI is taking that job too.

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As per Demis own words, “Maybe we were not supposed to be watching a screen so much?”

That was - by far - the most touching moment of our discussion. I could see a very human researcher, hoping to build good for humanity, and solving the world’s best problem while making us more human.

I laughed - and you can see me laugh on the 30-second video - and said: “Somehow AI will push us to be more human than?” To which he replied, smiling, “Wouldn’t that be a nice future?”

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So what’s left is what was always the real job. People.

Your job in 2030 will look more like my dad’s job in 1984 than it does today.

I asked Demis. And Demis agreed.

You can read the full article at: ruben.substack.com/p/i-…