‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind

Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?

In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.

Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls “enthusiastic” rock climbing. The eldest son of a Greek management professor and a British documentary maker, Gabriel split his time between teaching and international development work. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John’s College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of “yuppie ethics” and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn’t there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon.