In 1946, my grandfather, writing as ‘Murray Leinster’, published a science fiction story called ‘A Logic Named Joe’. Everyone has a computer (a ‘logic’) connected to a global network that does everything from banking to newspapers and video calls. One day, one of these logics, ‘Joe’, starts giving helpful answers to any request, anywhere on the network: invent an undetectable poison, say, or suggest the best way to rob a bank. Panic ensues – ‘Check your censorship circuits!’ – until they work out what to unplug. (My other grandfather, meanwhile, was using computers to spy on the Germans, and then the Russians.)

For as long as we’ve thought about computers, we’ve wondered if they could make the jump from mere machines, shuffling punch-cards and databases, to some kind of ‘artificial intelligence’, and wondered what that would mean, and indeed, what we’re trying to say with the word ‘intelligence’. There’s an old joke that ‘AI’ is whatever doesn’t work yet, because once it works, people say ‘that’s not AI – it’s just software’. Calculators do super-human maths, and databases have super-human memory, but they can’t do anything else, and they don’t understand what they’re doing, any more than a dishwasher understands dishes, or a drill understands holes. A drill is just a machine, and databases are ‘super-human’ but they’re just software. Somehow, people have something different, and so, on some scale, do dogs, chimpanzees and octopuses and many other creatures. AI researchers have come to talk about this as ‘general intelligence’ and hence making it would be ‘artificial general intelligence’ – AGI.

If we really could create something in software that was meaningfully equivalent to human intelligence, it should be obvious that this would be a very big deal. Can we make software that can reason, plan, and understand? At the very least, that would be a huge change in what we could automate, and as my grandfather and a thousand other science fiction writers have pointed out, it might mean a lot more. — Read More