Sliding Doors
What might have been.
Dateline: Bangkok, 8th May 2026.
As I am sure many of you know, many years ago I helped to found Consult Hyperion. We moved into our office on the then brand new Surrey Research Park, adjacent to the University of Surrey in Guildford. The park had opened in 1985 and by 1989 there were already 65 companies operating there. We were very happy there and remained on the Park for many years, gradually expanding by leasing the adjacent offices.
When a company moved into the office underneath ours, I remember going to down to introduce myself to them and find out what they did, hoping of course that they would be doing something interesting in the world of electronic transactions.
I have no recollection of who I spoke to, other than they were nice. It turned out that they were writing computer games, which sounded fun (but not as fun as working out how to rewrite code for a Data General MV/4000 (anyone else remember being as excited as I was to read “The Soul of. New Machine") to exploit the CISC hardware queuing capabilities in order to create a multi-user database platform, which is what I was doing) and my only real memory of that event is that I was surprised to discover just how much time and effort went into writing whatever game it was that they were working on.
What Might Have Been
Anyway, if you have read this far, you are presumably wondering why it is I am bathing in warm nostalgia for those happy years on the Park, working on satellite communications for the London Stock Exchange and card acquiring for AT&T amongst other things. Well, it’s because I’ve been reading Sebastian Mallaby’s highly recommended biography of one of England’s greatest men, the Nobel prize winner Sir Demis Habbibis. Imagine my surprise when I came across this crucial part of his life story:
Hassabis boarded a commuter train from London and set off for the exurban town of Guildford. By now Bullfrog had done well enough to vacate its dingy attic office, and the studio was housed in a shiny building in a research park… Hassabis exclaimed later. “I was literally skipping off the train, jumping on the bus to the research park. It was a beautiful sunny day and I was coming over the brow of a hill. I thought I had just gone to heaven.”
Actually he had just gone to Fredrick Sanger Road. Sir Demis had reported for his new job downstairs from us. What a sliding doors moment!
If he had accidentally gone through our door instead of theirs he could even as we speak be revolutionising the world of digital identity! I’ve spent years getting absolutely nowhere trying to persuade banks (for example) to work together to create the identification, authentication and authorisation infrastructure that society desperately needs. I’ve wasted countless hours sitting on advisory groups and working groups and providing responses to consultations.
Imagine if Sir Denis’ intellect had been redirected away from artificial intelligence and into verifiable credentials! We could have written a book together! More than that I could have taught him to play Dungeons & Dragons because he was probably bored with being a chess champion by then! He’s a Liverpool fan but I’m sure I could have persuaded him to come up the road and watch Woking FC from time to time!
Ah, what could have been.
I’ve only ever been in the same room as Sir Demis once. This was at Davos, when I was privileged to sit in on a fantastic panel discussion about international AI development. Sir Demis said that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the future. As a fanboy, I took this to heart and therefore refuse to believe that we will soon be slaves to Elon Musk’s robot army, which is a great comfort in these difficult times.