OXFORD – In the mid-1960s, the mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptographer I.J. Good proposed a thought experiment that has since become the secular gospel of Silicon Valley. If we were to build an “ultraintelligent machine,” he argued, it could then design even better machines, sparking an intelligence explosion that would leave human cognition far behind. The first such machine, therefore, would be “the last invention that man need ever make.”

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