In the spring of 1993, the research arm of NASA organized a conference on the frontiers of knowledge and invited the most eclectic group of thinkers they could find. Biologists, sociologists and computer designers gathered for the three-day meeting in the unpromising setting of Westlake, Ohio. The mimeographed notes of the conference became legendary and still circulate, a sort of Shroud of Turin for the machine learning set. The introduction features a poem pecked out in IBM type titled “Into The Era of Cyberspace,” written with all the pocket-protector fluidity one might expect of a NASA engineer: “Our robots precede us/with infinite diversity/exploring the universe /delighting in complexity.” (Turing’s rhyming computer, you have to suspect, could have done better.)2°+ One of the first speakers at the conference was a San Diego State University professor named Vernor Vinge, whose remarks that day marked the start of an important era in our consideration of smart machines. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive the Post- Human Era his talk was called. “Within thirty years,” Vinge began, “we will have the technological ability to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”26 Vinge’s aim was not - or at least not merely - to tell a room full of NASA geeks who had been dreaming of life on another planet that life on our own planet might soon be replaced by whirring, calculating machines. Rather, he explained, he wanted to plot what a world of not simply intelligent, but intuitive machines might look like. Far from disappearing, Vinge thought AI would produce a sort of wisdom that would be inscrutable to humans. And this wisdom, buffed to perfection by high-speed judgment and endless data, would eventually and sensibly take over much of human activity. Real “Al”, Vinge said, would at the very least be used to design a world of quicker AI that would, in turn, yield to still-faster generations. “When greater-than- human inte