I'm Caleb Bissinger, and I'm Rufus Griscom.

And this is the next big idea.

Today, Demasasas wants to build superintelligence.

Should we trust him? For three years, two men met regularly at a pub in a leafy neighborhood in North London.

They'd climb the rickety wooden stairs to the second floor. And there, in a room that

was always empty, they'd sink into leather chairs beneath a tarnished chandelier and talk for hours.

One of the men was journalist Sebastian Malaby. The other was a local boy, chess prodigy who'd grown up

to be a video game designer, a neuroscientist,

a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and one of the most important and powerful figures in the world

of artificial intelligence. His name is Demas Hesabas. Those conversations, along with interviews

with more than a hundred people in Demas's orbit, are the grist of Sebastian's new book, The Infinity Machine.

It does all the standard biography stuff,

charting Demas' improbable journey to become the guy in charge of Google's AI.

But what really got me interested in Sebastian's book

is something he writes in the introduction.

New kind of intelligence, he says, is being

willed into the world by a remarkably small number of people. Each of them is driven by a particular

mix of curiosity and hubris, vanity and avarice, idealism, and craving, and the sobering reality

is that, for better or worse, the quality of their characters will affect society.

So, what motivates Demas? What are his talents, his flaws? What does he think of his rivals?

What does he think the world will look like if he succeeds? And if he really believes there's a chance AI could destroy us, why keep building it? These questions affect all of us.

And we'll try to answer them right after the break. And then, Rufus, why don't you come back at the

...