Aug 12, 2026 · 46 min · 11 segments
Steven Boykey Sidley has been a chief technology officer at a Fortune 500 company, a private equity investor, a videogame designer, a jazz musician and, for the past four years, a professor of…
Steven Boykey SidleyGuest
Fanie van RooyenHost
Science, um, the, the human endeavor of science, which has to do with humans being curious, seeing a problem, coming up with what they think is a solution to that problem or an explanation of that problem, publishing it, letting other people verify it or knock it down.
That is the scientific enterprise, okay? That has been the scientific enterprise for as long as humans have been doing science, particularly in a university environment.
So you got some professor, Einstein would be obviously the, the canonical example.
You look at a certain field and you say, "I wonder why that happens," and then you come up with a solution either in theory or experiments, and then you put it down on paper and other people tell you whether they agree or not.
That is now being assisted in ways that could not have been imagined even two years ago by vast advances, uh, enabled by AI.
Um, you know, the, the AlphaProtein, for your, for your viewers who may not know about AlphaProtein, AlphaProtein is a child of chess, and it's a chess program by Demis Hassabis, followed by AlphaGo, which was a program to play the game of Go.
Uh, the story of, of AlphaGo is Go is the most complex game ever devised by humans.
Um, and Go masters, particularly in Japan, are, are rock stars, okay? If you're a Go master, you're a rock star.
They, they're celebrities on, on, on the level of American basketball stars.
Fed them in, thing churned up, came up with generalized examples and then beat the world's best Go player, a guy called Lee Sedol.
Science, um, the, the human endeavor of science, which has to do with humans being curious, seeing a problem, coming up with what they think is a solution to that problem or an explanation of that problem, publishing it, letting other people verify it or knock it down.
That is the scientific enterprise, okay? That has been the scientific enterprise for as long as humans have been doing science, particularly in a university environment.
So you got some professor, Einstein would be obviously the, the canonical example.
You look at a certain field and you say, "I wonder why that happens," and then you come up with a solution either in theory or experiments, and then you put it down on paper and other people tell you whether they agree or not.
That is now being assisted in ways that could not have been imagined even two years ago by vast advances, uh, enabled by AI.
Um, you know, the, the AlphaProtein, for your, for your viewers who may not know about AlphaProtein, AlphaProtein is a child of chess, and it's a chess program by Demis Hassabis, followed by AlphaGo, which was a program to play the game of Go.
Uh, the story of, of AlphaGo is Go is the most complex game ever devised by humans.
Um, and Go masters, particularly in Japan, are, are rock stars, okay? If you're a Go master, you're a rock star.
They, they're celebrities on, on, on the level of American basketball stars.
Fed them in, thing churned up, came up with generalized examples and then beat the world's best Go player, a guy called Lee Sedol.
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