My view of what it's going to take to make a thinking machine has changed in recent years. When we started out, I naively believed that each of the pieces of intelligence could be engineered. I still believe that would be possible in principle, but it would take three hundred years to do it. There are so many different aspects to making an intelligent machine that if we used normal engineering methods the complexity would overwhelm us. That presents a great practical difficulty for me; I want to get this project done in my lifetime.
The other thing I've learned is how hard it is to get lots of people to work together on a project and manage the complexity. In some senses, a big connection machine is the most complicated machine humans have ever built. A connection machine has a few hundred billion active parts, all of which are working together, and the way they interact isn't really understood, even by its designers. The only way to design an object of this much complexity is to break it into parts. We decide it's going to have this box and that box and that box, and we send a group of people off to do each of those, and they have to agree on the interfaces before they go off and design their boxes.
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There's another approach besides this strict engineering approach which can produce something of that complexity, and that's the evolutionary approach. We humans were produced by a process that wasn't engineering. We now have computers fast enough to simulate the process of evolution within the computer. So we may be able to set up situations in which we can cause intelligent programs to evolve within the computer.
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It's haughty of us to think we're the end product of evolution. All of us are a part of producing whatever is coming next. We're at an exciting time. We're close to the singularity. Go back to that litany of chemistry leading to single-celled organisms, leading to intelligence. The first step took a billion years, the next step took a hundred million, and so on. We're at a stage where things change on the order of decades, and it seems to be speeding up. Technology has the autocatalytic effect of fast computers, which let us design better and faster computers faster. We're heading toward something which is going to happen very soon — in our lifetimes — and which is fundamentally different from anything that's happened in human history before.
People have stopped thinking about the future, because they realize that the future will be so different. The future their grandchildren are going to live in will be so different that the normal methods of planning for it just don't work anymore. When I was a kid, people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000. Now, at the end of the century, people are still talking about what's going to happen in the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year, ever since I was born. If I try to extrapolate the trends, to look at where technology's going sometime early in the next century, there comes a point where something incomprehensible will happen. Maybe it's the creation of intelligent machines. Maybe it's telecommunications merging us into a global organism. If you try to talk about it, it sounds mystical, but I'm making a very practical statement here. I think something's happening now — and will continue to happen over the next few decades — which is incomprehensible to us, and I find that both frightening and exciting.
