Google DeepMind CEO says we don't have much time to prepare for the 'new human era'

• Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said artificial general intelligence is a "few years away."
• He said AI will have huge societal implications, bringing about a "post-scarcity" world.
• Hassabis estimated that AGI will arrive around 2030.

The CEO of Google DeepMind said a more advanced AI is just around the corner — and humanity needs to prepare as soon as possible.

During a fireside chat at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that was posted on Tuesday, Demis Hassabis said artificial general intelligence, or the ability for AI to perform cognitive tasks at or beyond human levels, is a few years away.

"Maybe 2030, plus or minus a year, which is astounding to think, really. I think that will be such an enormous transformative technology; it's gonna effectively be a new human era," Hassabis said.

He equated its arrival to the singularity — a point in time when there's no turning back from a breakthrough technological development.

Hassabis, who leads one of the world's most influential AI labs, has been among the frontier AI executives warning that society has a narrow window to prepare for the next stage of the technology.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI could make wide swaths of jobs disappear, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said half of entry-level white-collar work could vanish in the next half-decade. Recently, the executives pulled back the doomerism talk.

During the fireside chat, Hassabis said some of his peers in the industry are being "way too certain" about their predictions. But he said AGI could unlock medical breakthroughs and economic transformation, raising the possibility of a "post-scarcity world" — an idea invoked by futurists like Elon Musk.

Because of AGI's potential, the DeepMind CEO said now is the time to brace for the impacts, calling on humanities and STEM students to adapt to the new era and "lean in" to the technology.

"Society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means," he said. "The future, in my view, is still to be written, but these next few years are going to be very critical as to which way that will go and how we collectively want that to look like."