capabilities emerge from regular physical processses, which we can trace down to the level of electrons, photons, quarks, and gluons. Evidently, brute matter can get pretty smart. Let me summarize the argument. From two strongly supported hypotheses, we’ve drawn a straightforward conclusion: e Human mind emerges from matter. e Matter is what physics says it is. e Therefore, the human mind emerges from physical processes we understand and can reproduce artificially. e Therefore, natural intelligence is a special case of artificial intelligence. Of course, our “astonishing corollary” could fail; the first two lines of this argument are hypotheses. But their failure would have to bring in a foundation-shattering discovery—a significant new phenomenon, with large-scale physical consequences, which takes place in unremarkable, well-studied physical circumstances (1.e., the materials, temperatures, and pressures inside human brains) yet which has somehow managed for many decades to elude determined investigators armed with sophisticated instruments. Such a discovery would be. . . astonishing. IT. The Future of Intelligence It is part of human nature to improve on human bodies and minds. Historically, clothing, eyeglasses, and watches are examples of increasingly sophisticated augmentations that enhance our toughness, perception, and awareness. They are major improvements to the natural human endowment, whose familiarity should not blind us to their depth. Today smartphones and the Internet are bringing the human drive toward augmentation into realms more central to our identity as intelligent beings. They are giving us, in effect, quick access to a vast collective awareness and a vast collective memory. At the same time, autonomous artificial intelligences have become world champions in a wide variety of “cerebral” games, such as chess and Go, and have taken over many sophisticated pattern-recognition tasks, such as reconstructing what happened during complex rea