Brian Cox: “We don’t know how powerful AI will become – it’s both exciting and potentially problematic”

What is the inspiration behind your latest live show Emergence?

It’s from a book I’ve loved for years: The Hexagonal Snowflake by Johannes Kepler. Kepler is best known for his laws of planetary motion in and around 1610, but he wrote this little book on New Year’s Eve in 1609 while walking across Charles Bridge in Prague in a snowstorm. He went to his benefactor’s house and had not bought him a gift. So he writes this beautiful little book about looking at the snowflakes that land on his arm, thinking about their symmetry and asking: Why are they hexagonal?

This is a really modern question. It’s a very 20th and 21st century scientist’s view of the world – where does the symmetry you see come from? He had no idea it had anything to do with water molecules and atoms. But one of the most important things about the book is that he says, “I don’t know.” This is really radical.

So the show is about…