They enact capabilities that humans have envisaged and programmed into them. The consequences – from machines stealing your job to eliminating drudgery to unravelling the enigmas of cancer to remote killing – are and will continue to be striking.īut even the most sophisticated machines created so far are intelligent in only a limited sense. They can perform a range of tasks, from playing world-beating chess to flying a plane or a car, and their capabilities are rapidly growing. Most obviously, machines can now execute complex mathematical operations many orders of magnitude faster than humans. Certainly, achievements in computer science over the last 75 years have been astonishing. Turing suggested programs that mimicked evolutionary processes could result in machines with intelligence comparable to or greater than that of humans. Bostrom has advanced radical ideas on transhumanism and even argued that it is more than likely we live inside a computer-generated virtual world.Īs early as the 1940s Alan Turing, John von Neumann and others saw that machines could one day have almost unlimited impact on humanity and the rest of life. Lovelock is famous for the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that life on Earth, taken as a whole, creates conditions that favour its own long-term flourishing. They are alike in that neither is afraid to develop and champion heterodox ideas. Bostrom is a 41-year-old academic philosopher Lovelock, now 94, is a theorist and a prolific inventor (his electron capture detector was key to the discovery of the stratospheric ozone hole). When could it happen and what could the consequences be? Both Nick Bostrom and James Lovelock address these questions. Suppose, then, we take the proposition seriously. And the consequences of creating them, they say, could be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity.

Scientists including Stephen Hawking and Max Tegmark believe that superintelligent machines are quite feasible. If you think this is all science fiction and fantasy, you may be wrong. Box-office success goes to tales in which intelligences created by humans rise up and destroy or enslave their makers.

But the smart money – or rather most of the money – points another way. I'd like to think that if superintelligent beings did exist they would be at least as enlightened as, say, the theologian Thomas Berry, who wrote that once we begin to celebrate the joys of the Earth all things become possible. It's a vision that I find appealing compared with many other imagined worlds. T he Culture novels of Iain M Banks describe a future in which Minds – superintelligent machines dwelling in giant spacecraft – are largely benevolent towards human beings and seem to take pleasure from our creativity and occasional unpredictability.

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