I was reading a book, "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence", written by Sebastian Mallaby on 31 March 2026. The book provides an inside look at the AI arms race through the lens of Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind and the 2024 Nobel Prize winner.
In Chapter 2, titled "Deep Philosophical Questions", I came across the following text:
"For a while after that fateful game in Liechtenstein, Hassabis had thought seriously about a career in theoretical physics. Here was a field that seemed to grapple with the biggest possible questions-the nature of the universe, the building blocks of reality. For a youth with vast ambition, the prospect of understanding everything was profoundly alluring, and physics held out the hope that you could rise above the clutter of quotidian facts to a higher plane of abstraction. From that loftier vantage point, physicists could explain reality in terms of phenomena unseen—atoms, gravity, geometry, time—and perhaps even discover an all-encompassing, unifying insight that knitted everything together. Every so often in the history of science, one giant theory displaces another: Copernicus announced that Earth was not the center of the universe; Einstein replaced Newtonian physics with general relativity. Perhaps humanity had arrived at another watershed in the progress of ideas—a moment when siloed understandings could be fused into a single theory.
Thrilling though this prospect seemed, Hassabis was also practical. When he signed up for a game, he liked to feel that he could win, and physics seemed like a long shot. The way he saw things, all physicists since Einstein had ultimately come up short. They had failed to hit on a theory that explained all of reality.
"Even Richard Feynman couldn't do it," Hassabis said, matter-of-factly. “He died without understanding anything. I realised that however good I was going to be, I was unlikely to surpass him.”
Following this line of thought, Hassabis hit upon the strategy. He resolved to go after the infinite mysteries of physics with the help of artificial intelligence. Science had always advanced courtesy of new tools: Telescopes had allowed humans to peer into space; X-ray machines had made it possible to see into humans without invasive surgery. Al would be the ultimate lever: an extension not merely of vision but of the capacity for understanding."
It is quite interesting to see how the human mind works. "Winning" is more important than truth. If I can't get a clue about understanding the fabric of the universe, let me win the game by understanding the ocean. I don't know why human beings are so impatient. Probably, a deep fear lies at the foundation of our existence. The fear of death. That's why we are in a hurry to do something, to create something, to invent something. When I watched the movie Oppenheimer, the same restlessness was visible in the hero's actions. He read the Bhagavad Gita and was deeply influenced by Krishna's message. He somehow wanted to carry out the experiment, even while realising the danger that the whole of the world may be destroyed, if the atmosphere gets ionised due to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, a dirty cold war started, and the countries started accumulating nuclear weapons, and the present USA-Iran conflict is also based on the desire of all the countries to grow more and more powerful using nuclear weapons.
It makes me recall the story of Ashwathama from the Mahabharata. When the Kauravas lost the battle of Kurukshetra to the Pandavas, Ashwathama could not bear the defeat and resorted to the Brahmastra. Arjuna also used Brahmastra in response. When Ved Vyasa and Krishna saw the same, he shouted at both of them and asked them to return the same. Arjuna knew how to do the same, but Ashwathama did not know. Finally, he changed the direction of the Brahmastra to kill the son of Uttara, the wife of Abhimanyu. Finally, Lord Krishna had to intervene to save Parikshit, who was later born of Uttara.
I don't really know how many People will use Brahmastra in a state of delirium. We just want to become the king of the ocean, if we are unable to get a hint of the fabric of the universe. The same restlessness is visible in the spiritual journey. People are hungry for experiences, and some Babas take advantage of the situation by offering false promises to millions, turning it into a money-minting business. We may make a nuclear bomb, we may develop AI, or we may set up huge spiritual organisations, but unless we handle the hard problem, we are not reaching anywhere. Just like Ashwathama, we will use the Brahmastra on a baby who is not yet born. The hard problem is not so hard and has already been cracked by the Indian sages and rishis. So many different Upanishads have been written to explain the nature of reality. When people could not perceive and understand these Upanishads, realised souls like Ved Vyasa and Valmiki tried to explain them through the stories of Krishna and Ram. In the contemporary world, too, realised souls such as Buddha, Kabir, and Sri Aurobindo have sought to explain the message of Vedanta. We just need to let go of that fixation on thoughts and dive deep into the world of consciousness. The only problem is that we do not want to let go of the control.
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