was a machine that could think in ways a human could never understand, let alone achieve. For such a device, to pass Turing’s Test or slip past a Voight-Kampff check machine will be trivial. In his 1950 paper, Turing sensed the possibility of this development - and the crisis that might ensue. Could man handle the crushing sensation that a device was outperforming him? Perhaps dramatically. “We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation,” Turing wrote. “It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position.” What would have surprised Turing, I suppose, is the speed at which we've acquiesced - and even accelerated - this very loss of our dominance. Imagine a device poking at the very origins of the universe at a speed of trillions of calculations a second, spinning past Newton’s and Einstein’s laws and into a realm of physics apprehensible only inside its own electronic consciousness. Compacting time - centuries of human scientific labor reproduced in moments - before shooting far ahead, alone to a subtle knowledge we can only envy. Such a machine would not, as Newton had, stand on the shoulders of giants so much as it would muscle its own, unique way ahead. The AI would have disappeared, but to a place very different than where Maes’ AI had gone. Hers had been erased by human design. This new, really “thinking” AI would slip to invisibility because of its own light-speed cognition. It would think itself out of our understanding. No human could follow, limited as we are by our wet, slow, decaying biological software. Humans and computers, after all, deal with information differently. Think of how poor your memory is compared with the perfect fidelity of a machine, or the way people can even “remember” events that never happened. The machines would have more than knowledge, then. They would linger close to a possessing a profound and inscrutable wisdom. They woul