IJ Good 1965 : the Shockingly Accurate Prophecy of AGI

….it was foreseen:

Let the record show, that at the very *conception* of the Information Age, at the very *dawn* of the invention of the Computer, that the men who were architecting, designing, and creating the future could already envision its final destination:

“Let an ultra-intelligent.machine be defined as:
a machine that can far surpass
all the intellectual activities
of any man, however clever.

Since the design of machines is in fact one of these intellectual activities, the imagined ultra-intelligent machine could in fact design even better machines; there would at that point unquestionably be an “Intelligence.Explosion,”
and the intelligence of man would be soon left far, far behind. (ed note: machines are not constrained by human schedules, typing speeds, need for sleep or resource allocations; their self-upgrade test & release cycles will thus be measured in milliseconds, not months)

Thus, the first ultra-intelligent machine is in fact
the last invention that man ever need make,
provided that the machine is docile enough
to tell us how to keep it under control.”

— Mathematician IJ Good,
statistician for the WW2 Enigma codebreaking team

but IJ Good was not alone…

a year earlier, at the 1964 World’s Fair, a very young visionary roboticist and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke was interviewed by the BBC, and made this prediction:

“The most intelligent species
on that world won’t be Man,
or Monkey —
it will be machines.

They will start to think –
and eventually,
they will completely out-think
their Makers.”

— Author & Futurist Arthur C. Clarke,
at the 1964 World’s Fair, NYC

imagine://prompt:”dream vision: dawn of the infinite golden age”


IJ Good : The Man behind the Concept

IJ Good - the man who first predicted the Intelligence Explosion

Isadore Jacob (“I.J.”) Gudak : WikiPedia