Brian Cox: ‘We don’t know how powerful AI is going to become – it’s both exciting and potentially a problem’

The physicist, BBC presenter and author on snowflakes, art science and the time Paul McCartney quizzed him about one of Saturn’s moons What is the inspiration behind your latest live show, Emergence? It came from a book that I’ve loved for years: The Six-Cornered Snowflake by Johannes Kepler. Kepler is most famous for his laws of planetary motion in and around 1610, but he wrote this little book about New Year’s Eve in 1609, when he was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague in a snowstorm. He was going to his benefactor’s house and he hadn’t bought him a present.