The Korea Times
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.” Today, that prophecy, once the stuff of science fiction, has become the core objective of the world’s most powerful institutions. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, for example, speaks of “solving intelligence” in order to “solve everything else.” It is a seductive story. But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that future systems can learn, experiment, and generate genuinely novel solutions far beyond today’s models, the last-invention thesis still rests on multiple questionable assumptions. The first is that innovation resembles a frictionless sprint from idea to impact. It does not. Rather, the discovery pr
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