DeepMind built a board game to game out AI in science, centered on middle powers
JMarty97 · reddit · 2026-09-22
Podcast with Zoë Brammer and Ankur Vora, who lead strategic foresight at Google DeepMind, on why they built a board game to simulate AI's impact on science.
Key points:
- What strategic foresight means and why AI is so hard to plan around;
- Why the game deliberately centers on "middle power" countries like the UK, Germany, and Singapore rather than the US and China;
- Unexpected tradeoffs participants discover, including how fragile public trust in science funding really is;
- Why human scientists may become more relevant as AI takes on more of the science itself.
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