Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

Superintelligence, he had said in his thesis,11 could bring unprecedented wealth and opportunity—or lead to a “nightmare scenario” that threatened the very existence of humankind. Even if there was only a tiny possibility of building superintelligence, he believed, researchers had to consider the consequences. “If one accepts that the impact of truly intelligent machines is likely to be profound,12 and that there is at least a small probability of this happening in the foreseeable future, it is only prudent to try to prepare for this in advance. If we wait until it seems very likely that intelligent machines will soon appear, it will be too late to thoroughly discuss and contemplate the issues involved,” he wrote. “We need to be seriously working on these things now.” His larger belief was that the brain itself would provide a map for building superintelligence, and this was what took him to the Gatsby Unit. “That seemed like a very natural place to go,” he says—a place where he could explore what he called the “connections between the brain and machine learning.”