The Infinity Delusion
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
One joyful evening recently I listened to a performance from the BBC Proms of Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder.
These five songs, based on poems by Friedrich Ruckert, are beautiful in their simplicity.. One describes the scent that is released when the twig of a linden tree is broken. One is about the nature of love. In another the poet awakes at midnight and is overwhelmed by the suffering of mankind and only finds peace when feeling able to surrender their strength into God’s hands.
As I listened I was taken beyond the reach of material worlds, towards the lyrical , the spiritual and the infinite. In the words of one of the poems ‘I am lost to the world….I am dead to the world’s tumult and I rest in a quiet realm.’.
I have just finished reading Sebastian Mallaby’s brilliant book - ‘The Infinity Machine – Demis Hassabis, Deep Mind and the Quest for Superintelligence.
Mallaby describes Deep Mind’s triumph in designing an agent that is able to defeat Lee Sedol, the world champion of the complex Korean game of Go. Unlike earlier versions, the agent has been so well designed and trained that it can pull off unpredictable masterstrokes, leaving human competitors astonished and defeated. A few years after his defeat ‘a saddened Lee announced his retirement, saying he no longer felt joy in playing’. Perhaps he too felt, in a different way, lost to the world, or at least defeated by it.
Says another Go player, Thore Graepel
‘This is how we have to imagine the future. In the world of Go we have achieved superhuman intelligence…... At first it looks harmless. Then it’s just completely dominating. We don’t understand the mechanics, the tactics, the strategies. We just know that it is in control’.
Here I sensed a contradiction. Earlier in the book, Hassabis is quoted as saying that to build AI we should understand human intelligence first.
And yet nowhere in the quest for ‘superintelligence’ does there appear to be any interest in the dimensions of human intelligence so well illustrated in the Ruckert poems. Emotional intelligence, spiritual awareness, perception, imagination, empathy. No-one is programming computers to replicate these. No-one can.
While it may be reassuring that machines cannot be taught these forms of intelligence, it is alarming if our world is now to be in the hands of people who cannot tell the difference.
A few years ago, Mallaby writes, Deep Mind, now owned by Google, brought together industry leaders to discuss how this new technology may be kept accountable. There is a strong disagreement between Elon Musk, by now working with Open AI, and Larry Page, one of Google’s founders. Musk says he is terrified of superhuman intelligence. Page disagrees.
‘He looked forward to a time when people might merge with intelligence machines, or when machines might simply replace humans. Evolution would ensure that the best form of intelligence won out: if the best form involved fast silicon circuits not slow biological tissue, so be it. There was no point in being sentimental about such things. It would be survival of the fittest’.
This, it must be remembered, is Larry Page, not Demis Hassabis. Hassabis, the worthy winner of a Nobel prize for his contribution to human health through the deployment of AI to the mapping of the human genome, demonstrates a far more multi-dimensional view of human feeling and human potential.
And yet….
Nowhere in the book’s description of the race towards Superintelligence is there a mention of spirituality or emotional intelligence or empathy – all essential elements of human intelligence. I am left with admiration for the extraordinary progress made in the discovery of AI but astonishment at what those inventors fail to perceive, let alone value, in their descriptions of human intelligence.
There is now much discussion as to whether AI agents display any form of self-awareness or consciousness. It is reassuring to find that recent research suggests that the octopus displays much more evidence of consciousness than any AI system. [i]
Pope Leo puts this well in his Encyclical Magna Humanitas:
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretence that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance [ii]
In order to deploy AI we first need to know its limitations and manage the risks that come with its power. Yet, as Mallaby’s book makes clear, in spite of the individual worries of entrepreneurs as different as Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, both feel compelled to compete in a headlong and extravagantly funded race which lacks the guardrails needed to protect humanity.
You do not have to be a follower of any organised religion to believe strongly that human beings are more than calculators, and that a rich human life depends on the success of individuals, families, institutions and societies in promoting the ability of human beings everywhere to express their individuality and their emotions. We are betraying the next generation if we allow the obsession with the technicalities of AI to suppress human curiosity and sideline any sense of mystery and wonder in our children.
We should stop talking about AI as if it is capable of replacing the richness of human potential. We should stop treating AI agents as if they were people. And we should stop talking about AI as an ‘infinity machine’.
The term ‘infinite’ belongs to the richness, the diversity, and the originality of human capabilities. As Shakespeare puts it in words spoken by Hamlet.
What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.
Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and the author, with Ong Boon Hwee, of Entrusted: Stewardship for Responsible Wealth Creation (World Scientific 2020). He is Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank.
[i] Economist 22 August 2026 p16
