change, and in which no stepwise, hierarchical, or abstract reasoning is necessary. Many of the successes come not from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but from the brute-force power of faster chips and Bigger Data, which allow the programs to be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new ones. Each system is an idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not set up to solve, and a brittle mastery of those it was. And to state the obvious, none of these programs has made a move toward taking over the lab or enslaving its programmers. Even if an artificial intelligence system tried to exercise a will to power, without the cooperation of humans it would remain an impotent brain in a vat. A superintelligent system, in its drive for self-improvement, would somehow have to build the faster processors that it would run on, the infrastructure that feeds it, and the robotic effectors that connect it to the world—all impossible unless its human victims worked to give it control of vast portions of the engineered world. Of course, one can always imagine a Doomsday Computer that is malevolent, universally empowered, always on, and tamperproof. The way to deal with this threat is straightforward: Don’t build one. What about the newer AI threat, the value-alignment problem, foreshadowed in Wiener’s allusions to stories of the Monkey’s Paw, the genie, and King Midas, in which a wisher rues the unforeseen side effects of his wish? The fear is that we might give an AI system a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned. If we gave an AI the goal of maintaining the water level behind a dam, it might flood a town, not caring about the people who drowned. If we gave it the goal of making paper clips, it might turn all the matter in the reachable universe into paper clips, including our possessions and bodies. If we