&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Google DeepMind CEO says we don't have much time to prepare for the 'new human era'. What are AGI capabilities he is warning about?")
Recently, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — the point at which AI can perform at or beyond human levels — is no longer a distant goal, but could happen as early as 2030, plus or minus a year. The winner of Nobel Prize for chemistry called this the beginning of a "new human era," and added that humanity has only a few years left to prepare. His warning was that society risks squandering that window on hype and backlash rather than genuine readiness.
What does Demis Hassabis mean? Is it going to create the ‘robots taking over humans’ era? What kind of AGI is dangerous?
Also read: Nvidia's next AI push: 5 biggest announcements from CEO Jensen Huang's GTC Taipei 2026 keynote
AGI will be a civilizational inflection point for humanity
Hassabis appears to envision a "golden era" of radical abundance — AGI solving what he calls "root-node problems" like diseases, and finding new energy sources. But he also is warning that the transition will be so fast and so sweeping that societies, governments, and institutions won't have time to adapt unless they start preparing now. He sees 2026 itself as a turning point, with AI agents and tool-use capabilities already becoming genuinely useful in everyday work.
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What are AGI capabilities now?
Today's frontier AI models can write code, pass exams, conduct research, and reason across complex domains — but they still lack true general reasoning and autonomous learning. Sceptics point to benchmarks like ARC-AGI-3 as evidence that current systems remain far from human-level general reasoning. But some tech founders believe AGI thresholds have already been crossed, while mainstream researchers say we're close but not there yet.
Why is Artificial General Intelligence dangerous?
A recent DeepMind research paper warned that AGI could "permanently destroy humanity", listing existential risks as clear examples of harm if the technology develops without safeguards. Near-term risks include economic disruption. Anthropic, the firm behind the Claude AI model, has predicted that unemployment could hit 10 to 20 per cent as up to half of entry-level jobs will get automated. A technology this powerful arriving before alignment, regulation, and social safety nets could cause irreversible harm before anyone can course-correct.
