Director Greg Kohs uses every tool in the editing palette to explain how Artificial General Intelligence (as differentiated from Artificial Intelligence) works

If you don’t follow science news much, you may only be aware of Artificial Intelligence as a new-fangled thingy that somehow makes TikToks of kittens singing versions of Don’t You Want Me Like I Want You Baby in an ickle kid voice. If that’s your level of engagement with AI, then this competent, fluent documentary offers a very approachable entry into the subject. It’s not, however, a wide-lens overview of the subject but a character-driven study of one specific, key-player company in the industry: DeepMind, whose intercapped name betrays its origins in the 2010 tech-boom era.

As it happens, DeepMind is now officially called Google DeepMind and is part of a suite of divisions developing robotics and solving problems using AI – sorry, AGI because it’s not just Artificial Intelligence we’re talking about here, but Artificial General Intelligence (it gets explained). The fact that Google and its tech overlords are involved, however amiable they seem when seen in their office casual dress (former CEO Eric Schmidt at least), means this has more than a little flavour of corporate video, investor-fluffing, and self-congratulatory smugness about it. But DeepMind’s British founder and CEO Demis Hassabis manages to come across as a pretty nice guy with a genuinely interesting backstory. The son of a Greek father and a Singaporean mother raised in London, he was a child chess prodigy who became a video game designer; instead, he opted to go into a purer form of research on how thinking itself works, and that became his business.

The darkly comic tale of siblings stretched to breaking point has been adapted by Cassa Pancho for Ballet Black. The novel’s author re-encounters her characters on stage

One dead body. Two sisters. Two pairs of yellow gloves. The wiping away of the evidence; one sister efficiently, the other lazily. And in the background, an enigmatic score.

So begins the Ballet Black adaptation of my debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer . I have dreamed of it coming to life via various visual mediums – film, TV, as a musical, as a play. Not once did I consider it as a ballet production. And not because I don’t love the medium – in a former life I joined a ballet school, which we won’t dwell on here – but because, in creating this story, I focused heavily on dialogue and a ballet is essentially wordless.

The Moneyball author is joined by writers including Dave Eggers and Geraldine Brooks in a hymn of praise to the workers who keep America’s cogs turning

It is a tad obnoxious for Michael Lewis, perhaps America’s most consistently successful nonfiction author, to open his new book by boasting that a previous one sold half a million copies, but bear with him. The book in question was 2018’s The Fifth Risk, in which Lewis smartly responded to Donald Trump’s first administration with profiles of a handful of unknown federal government employees in order to valorise what Trump scorned and highlight the cost of breaking it. His point in the introduction to Who Is Government? is that you could lift the lid on any department and find a similar treasure trove of stories: people you’ve never heard of, doing work whose importance you’ve never understood.

Last year, Lewis assembled a crack team of long-form writers to uncover more of these stories for the Washington Post, and those articles are collected here. The gods have yet again smiled on him, if not his country, because the timing is horrendously perfect. One of the many people who doesn’t understand how the US government works has somehow been permitted to take it down to the studs in the name of “efficiency”. Elon Musk’s Doge has only been running for a few weeks but Americans will be suffering the consequences of his ignorant vandalism for many years to come, in health, national security, disaster preparation and more. It would not be surprising to learn that some of the people interviewed here have already been laid off, or their work defunded. At any rate, Musk’s demolition derby makes this kind of journalism feel, more than ever, like a civic duty.

High-fashion tracksuits, lonely washing lines and northern soul dancing … a new exhibition shows how working-class photographers view modern Britain

Lin Jianjie’s remarkable debut feature keeps you guessing to the final scene – a thrilling film directed and performed immaculately

This knockout debut feature from Chinese writer-director Lin Jianjie is like some kind of cinematic kinetic mobile, such as the ones artist Alexander Calder designed in the last century; it’s so exquisitely balanced that it’s able to keep reconfiguring itself with the merest breeze into a whole new arrangement of shapes that’s just as pleasing and abstract as the last. Precision and random chance, freestyle inspiration and formal craft are all in constant play here. That perfectly complements the story itself, a parable about a tricky space – the family unit – where talent, ambition and the lottery of genetics and luck all dance around one another, held in place by gravity and desire. It really is that good, and well-worth seeing in a cinema, not just on a small screen at home, so as to appreciate Zhang Jiahao’s sculptural cinematography and the sparse palette of composer Toke Brorson Odin’s score.

The story takes place in an unnamed Chinese city; outside, we see glimpses of Chengdu, Hangzhou and Beijing, but most of the action is inside a tastefully appointed flat, all glassy surfaces and privacy screens made of stylised foliage. This is where 15-year-old Tu Wei (Lin Muran) lives with his upper-middle-class parents who are never named. Dad is a highly regarded biological scientist (Zu Feng), and mum (Guo Ke-Yu) a former flight attendant, which means her language skills allowed her to travel.

Will racing driver Billy Monger, who lost both his legs in an accident, finish a gruelling triathlon? Plus: Gareth Southgate’s inspiring lecture. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC One
“This is the year that took me to the edge.” A big statement coming from racing driver Billy Monger, who lost both his legs in a racing accident when he was just 17 years old. Here he is today, taking on one of the most extreme endurance challenges on the planet – an Ironman in Kona, Hawaii, where he’ll need to swim 2.4 miles in the ocean, cycle 112 miles and run 26.2 miles. It’s all for charity, so prepare for an emotional journey. Hollie Richardson

The literary giant’s only child reflects on his father’s devotion in their days together in rural Scotland, his early death, his genius as a writer – and his reputation as a womaniser

Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three weeks old, he was adopted. Nine months later, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died at 39, after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given for a hysterectomy. Family and friends expected Blair’s father, Eric, to un-adopt him. Fortunately, Eric, better known as George Orwell, was an unusually hands-on dad for the 1940s.

Orwell and Eileen had wanted children for years, but he was sterile and it is likely that she was infertile as a result of uterine cancer. Having finally agreed to adopt after their struggle, Orwell was not going to give up on his son. “The thing he wanted most in life was to have children,” says Blair. “And now I was his family.”

Pompidou Centre show featuring 150 artists of African heritage is the last before the gallery shuts for five years

For many black artists and intellectuals, postwar Paris was a cosmopolitan hub. While colonisation, racism and segregation cast a shadow over their countries of origin, the City of Light appeared then a more liberated place where they were free to mix, study, work and create.

Now, a new exhibition – the last major event at Paris’s Pompidou Centre before it closes for a five-year renovation in September – explores the “unrecognised and fundamental” contribution these artists made to the French capital and how it influenced them.

I drove 2,000 miles with a French friend across my home country – and saw the endless nowhere land that is the crucible of Trumpism

In 1941 Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who reported from Germany in the lead-up to the second world war, wrote an essay for Harper’s about the personality types most likely to be attracted to Nazism, headlined “ Who Goes Nazi? ” “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t – whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi,” Thompson wrote.

Talia Lavin , a US writer, recently gave Thompson’s idea an update on Substack with an essay of her own: “Who Goes Maga?”

Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent