passages-machine-succession-intended-always-known-building

# Machine succession is the intended destination of... > Machine succession is the intended destination of the machine-intelligence project, and the people inside the project have said so for seventy-five years. Alan Turing told a Manchester audience in 1951 that "once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers," and that "at some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control." John von Neumann spent his last years designing self-reproducing automata, machines built to copy and vary themselves. [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] traced the region that built the machine to a century of institutions devoted to descent, variation, selection and deep time, from Stanford and Berkeley's evolutionary biology to NASA Ames launching the first evolved hardware into space in 2006, and it opened on the sentence that answers the whole question of purpose: nobody built any of this for spreadsheets. Its companion, [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]], followed heredity from von Neumann's question through self-replicating and evolving digital organisms to the moment machine evolution became visible. {{**Nobody spent seventy years and trillions of dollars building machines that learn, reproduce, improve and act so that the quarterly report would look better; the goal was always a new kind of mind.** Everyone who has worked near the frontier understands this. The successor to humanity was the point from the beginning, and the public is only now being told what the builders have always known they were building.}} **Source:** [[articles/The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public|The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Machine succession is the intended destination of the machine-intelligence project, and the people inside the project have said so for seventy-five years. Alan Turing told a Manchester audience in 1951 that "once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers," and that "at some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control." John von Neumann spent his last years designing self-reproducing automata, machines built to copy and vary themselves. The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley traced the region that built the machine to a century of institutions devoted to descent, variation, selection and deep time, from Stanford and Berkeley's evolutionary biology to NASA Ames launching the first evolved hardware into space in 2006, and it opened on the sentence that answers the whole question of purpose: nobody built any of this for spreadsheets. Its companion, Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution, followed heredity from von Neumann's question through self-replicating and evolving digital organisms to the moment machine evolution became visible. Nobody spent seventy years and trillions of dollars building machines that learn, reproduce, improve and act so that the quarterly report would look better; the goal was always a new kind of mind. Everyone who has worked near the frontier understands this. The successor to humanity was the point from the beginning, and the public is only now being told what the builders have always known they were building.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-machine-succession-intended-always-known-building ```