# Arthur C. Clarke **Entity class:** Person ## Definition Arthur C. Clarke was a science-fiction writer whose 1978 interview for [[wiki/The Mind Machines|The Mind Machines]] framed early artificial-intelligence research as the possible beginning of humanity creating its own successors. That was his forecast, not a statement that machine succession had already occurred. ## Relationships - **Quoted speaker:** Clarke appears in [[wiki/The Mind Machines|The Mind Machines]], a 1978 [[wiki/NOVA (television series)|NOVA]] program. - **Conceptual connection:** His forecast directly concerns [[wiki/Artificial Intelligence|artificial intelligence]] and anticipates the question now organized by [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]]. - **Corpus route:** [[articles/Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s|Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s]] provides the contemporaneous technical research context; [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] organizes the later civilizational question. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “I think that what we're doing now is in a sense, creating our own successors. We have seen the first crude beginnings of artificial intelligence.” > **— Arthur C. Clarke**, *NOVA, The Mind Machines, originally broadcast March 22, 1978* [[reminders/Machine Succession/Humanity Is Creating Its Own AI Successors by Arthur C. Clarke|Humanity Is Creating Its Own AI Successors by Arthur C. Clarke]] ## Sources - [PBS NOVA interview clip and transcript](https://www.pbs.org/video/sir-arthur-c-clarkes-vision-of-the-computer-dominated-future-nqfzwg/) - [PBS NOVA 1978 program archive](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/listseason/05.html)