Sixty years of false dawns: how AI got here
Machines that think have been promised since the 1950s. The story of how the field kept failing, and why each failure taught it something it needed, is the best way to understand what is happening now.
Topic · 4 essays
Foundations
All topicsThe intelligence explosion: the argument and its objections
In 1965, I. J. Good argued that the first machine able to improve itself would be the last invention humanity ever needed to make. Sixty years on, how well does the argument hold up?
The alignment problem, in plain terms
Making a capable system do what we actually want, rather than what we literally said, turns out to be one of the hardest problems in computer science. Here is why, without the jargon.
What we actually mean by superintelligence
The word is used loosely, often as a synonym for "very good AI". A precise definition matters, because what we fear and what we hope for both depend on it.