To spend time with Matt Bellamy is to lie down willingly in the fast lane of the information superhighway. Within moments of settling into the corner table of a Primrose Hill café, the dressed-down but higher-thinking Muse frontman is in full flow, dissecting the present and future of artificial intelligence like a thousand-mile-an-hour TED talk made flesh. It’s such brain-stretching stuff that you feel like a blinking, newborn AI being turned on for the first time.
“Sam Altman is the king of AI, but he’s the most frightened of it,” says the most brainiac of stadium rockers, his keen interest in investing in Silicon Valley clean energy companies having made him privy to talks by the Zuckerbergs and Altmans of the tech-bro world. “Deadly serious, he’s like, ‘there’s a 10 per cent chance this is going to end humanity’. Well don’t f***ing do it then! Turn it off!” The dark side, Bellamy says, might be “redundancy, depression, and worst-case scenarios where we’re essentially passing on the baton, evolutionary speaking, to the next species and our best hope is that we’re going to be their pets.”
