Last night's bedtime listen of the BBC's Desert Island Discs program was a 2017 interview with Demis Hassabis. As is often the case with the guests on this excellent program, I hadn't previously heard of Hassabis. Through the interview and a subsequent perusal of Hassabis' Wikipedia page and Business Insider profile, I learned that he is a British computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of the London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind.

He has lived a remarkable life in his 47 years. According to Wikipedia, he was a child prodigy in chess from the age of 4 and a master by the time he turned 13. He completed his A-levels (a qualification obtained after completing secondary or pre-university education) when he was 15 and scholarship-level exams when he was 16. Though accepted to Cambridge University, Hassabis—at the suggestion of the university because of his age—took a gap year, working as a video game developer. After graduating from Cambridge at the age of 20 with a double first-class honours degree, he returned to video game development, eventually starting his own firm. He subsequently went back to university to obtain a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London (UCL), then continued his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University and UCL. In 2010, he cofounded DeepMind, which Google purchased for £400 million just four years later. He remains the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Even more than Hassabis' impressive credentials, what grabbed my attention in the BBC's Desert Island Discs program was his advice to parents. In response to host Kirsty Young's question about what parents can do to help their very bright young kids fit into the world, he responded:

I think that what I would do is encourage them to explore heavily when they’re young and really get a wide range of experiences. So encourage deepness and expertise in things, but not at the expense of everything else. Life’s so rich—you should partake in all of it, right? So I think the kind of skills I would teach children today are the ability to learn rather than a specific thing that you’re learning. One of the first things you should learn about, which is not taught in schools, is about yourself. How do you work best? What do you want? What’s your dream? What are you excited about? And I think you have to explore that and find that out for yourself.

Life’s so rich—you should partake in all of it. What fascinating advice. It reminded me of the story Kurt Vonnegut told of a conversation he had had at 15 with an archeologist, who said:

"I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them."

Vonnegut said that this conversation changed his life, adding:

Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could "win" at them.

Ironically, Hassabis' parents had pulled him out of school to focus on chess. At the time, he was the second highest ranked player in the world for his age. But at a tournament in Lichtenstein, after losing a 10-hour game to a man (then Danish champion), the 11-year-old Hassabis wondered, "Are we wasting our minds?" He told Young in the BBC interview that he looked around at all the fantastically smart people at that chess tournament and asked himself, "What if we used that brain power for something more useful like solving cancer or curing some disease?"

In the interview, Young also asked Hassabis whether he was concerned about what President Obama had called the "individualization of culture" and the loss of connection between people "as our computers and as things like AI begin to allow us to live the lives that are entirely adapted and defined by us." Hassabis answered:

I think that’s been the case always with any kind of technology. Maybe it’s accentuated today with our current technology—mobile, Internet, you know, AI and things like this—but I think it’s important to be getting very broad in your upbringing so that you’re used to understanding different points of view, different things and actually going and seeking that, right, and enjoying that and learning how to deal with that sort of disagreement in a constructive way.

Still inspired by Hassabis' advice to parents to help their kids explore their curiosity for many things, I came across a LinkedIn post today featuring a video of Caleb Stewart (then 4), lauding the benefits of reading. He says:

I am here to speak to you about the importance and benefits of reading. I personally read every day and absolutely love the adventure of reading. I will stand before you and speak with confidence and not be afraid. Reading every day has made me smarter. Reading has also strengthened my vocabulary and language skills, allowing me to pronounce new and big words without even thinking about it. Reading has incredibly enriched my long-term memory. Enhancing ideas, thoughts and problem-solving skills, reading aloud to kids daily and helping them develop their literacy skills is one of the most important things parents and teachers can do. Although books are excellent tools for reading, it’s one of the best tools for knowledge.

Caleb's speech brought to mind the Dr. Seuss quote: "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go."