Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#31

Post by adrianN » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

dwoldrich wrote: post #19

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 0 chance of that. You can maybe say that for things like material science, nuclear stuff, weird physics, and so on (basically anything relating to making big booms, delivering big booms, or ensuring others can't make big booms). But having LLMs as we understand them now in the 80s would be impossible. They simply didn't have the compute necessary. The entire world combined didn't have it. For reference, a sin…

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's? NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it. You have to b…

Far-out theories need solid evidence to be believable. However, there is not even circumstantial evidence to suggest that anybody was five decades ahead of public technology. You might rather claim that the military has super advanced aircraft, at least we have lots of sightings of UFOs doing apparently miraculous aerial acrobatics.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#32

Post by awinter-py » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

Yeah the hyperparallelism and the fact that it would emerge from machine translation are shockingly good calls. There are things in there that resemble the bag of words model, his 'clumps' sound a lot like tokenization, and he has concepts like RAG.

Also, of the early AI writers, I think he was the least doom-y. Norbert wiener and I think von neumann were very concerned about the social effects of the singularity (von neumann's word for it).

Vernor Vinge has an 80s essay calling down to Good a lot, and credits him with a 'meta golden rule' which aspirationally says that what comes after us will care about their origins.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#33

Post by shermantanktop » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

zulux wrote: post #24

nialse wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The required high degree of connectivity might be attained with the help of microminiature radio transmitters and receivers. > Hahaha, this is straight out of 60s-70s sci-fi, where their best futuristic interfaces were smaller CRT screens / flashy keys, etc. Actually that is not far off from how high bandwidth interconnects work, but through other media.

Agreed. It's basically RF guided by wires, or light guided by glass/plastic. And... I hate to say it, but I've been interacting with computers connected to WiFi about 90% of the time over the last week. Rarely used a physical Ethernet link.

Funny to think that WiFi is in fact just a specialized variant of the radio technology explosion that started with Marconi.

Technically of course the path is continual evolution, but the applications are wildly different.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#34

Post by za_creature » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #31

dwoldrich wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's? NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it. You have to b…

Far-out theories need solid evidence to be believable. However, there is not even circumstantial evidence to suggest that anybody was five decades ahead of public technology. You might rather claim that the military has super advanced aircraft, at least we have lots of sightings of UFOs doing apparently miraculous aerial acrobatics.

50 years for large models is a stretch, though TI did have smaller, real-time field-trainable neural nets almost 40 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin#Seeker

It was featured in one of the Modern Warfare games from around 20 years ago, and I looked it up because back then, I called bs on the fire & forget aspect.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#35

Post by eszed » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #10

classified wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “intelligence explosion” > Well, that didn't happen. Not only that, but in my cynical eyes the proliferation of LLMs has triggered a stupidity explosion. Either that, or it just made it blatantly obvious by how much stupidity we have been surrounded the whole time without realizing it. No other development demonstrated so clearly that the dark ages where we believed in sorcery and miracles have never really ended.

I think it is exposing how weakly people grasp communications. The amount of implied everything in most people's communications is extremely high, and those same people do not understand they are using implied information that a non-human construct really struggles to figure out what the human is talking about. I help a lot of non-technical people use AI, and asking them not to imply and to explain what they mean...…

Yes. Furthermore, when I write precisely - because it's an important subject (read: will cost the company money) where we must be on the same page - people's eyes glaze over, and they ask for a meeting or a phone call instead. So, we do that, and I answer all the questions, and then everyone goes away with a different idea about what we're talking about. The only person who doesn't do that is our controller, who'll tell me "I had to read this three times, but now I understand", and I love her for it. Sadly, she doesn't make decisions, just pays the bills.

I'm sure it's my fault, somehow - but I'm a damn good writer; I just don't know how to communicate with people who won't put forth the effort to engage with detail.

The latest advice is "put in through [LLM]". Which, yeah, takes out the details, and makes bullet points, but sometimes the details are the point... Right?

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#36

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

eszed wrote: post #35

bsenftner wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is exposing how weakly people grasp communications. The amount of implied everything in most people's communications is extremely high, and those same people do not understand they are using implied information that a non-human construct really struggles to figure out what the human is talking about. I help a lot of non-technical people use AI, and asking them not to imply and to explain what they mean...…

Yes. Furthermore, when I write precisely - because it's an important subject (read: will cost the company money) where we must be on the same page - people's eyes glaze over, and they ask for a meeting or a phone call instead. So, we do that, and I answer all the questions, and then everyone goes away with a different idea about what we're talking about. The only person who doesn't do that is our controller, who'll t…

I realize this may sounds like a lot of effort, but I find telling stories of how a person would use the system, with theatrics of confusion and failure, tend to penetrate the dull unwilling to think participants I must engage to get my work completed. I'm not an actor or a good speaker, I grew up with a severe stutter, and I find I have to "put on a show" to generate the dawn of comprehension in others.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#37

Post by Lerc » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

I think it's worth noting the date of this when people claim that AI is being rushed without asking any of the important questions of what it might mean for us. This has been a topic of serious discussion for many many years.

It feels like the people who laughed at these fanciful ideas then are the ones now pretending those same ideas are new revelations that have gone unconsidered.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#38

Post by usefulcat » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

> It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.”

It’s not uncommon to find these kinds of predictions from the twentieth century, which of course with hindsight can seem wildly optimistic.

But I think there are understandable reasons for that optimism.

Imagine you were born in the early twentieth century, say roughly 1910 +/- 10 years. If you had been born then, you would probably have lived through all of the following:

- The transition from horses to motor vehicles

- The invention of the airplane, from first flight to supersonic

- Not one but two world wars

- The splitting of the atom

- Human spaceflight, including traveling to the moon

If you’d been born slightly earlier, you could also add electrification to that list.

When I compare what I’ve seen in my life so far, I don’t think anything comes close (for better and worse) to even one of those things. So yeah, of course they were optimistic about technological progress—look at what they just lived through.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#39

Post by dsign » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

Up to five years ago[^1], we lived an age of pure speculation about intelligence and minds. That age brought about multiple theories of the mind, and to me, their finest legacy are arguments of the form "$X is not $concept because $theory", where any given day $X can be "LLM" or "LLM+harness+tool", "agent" and $concept can be "intelligent", "aware", "rational", "long-termed", , etc. Those arguments, in the context of $theory, are not wrong, and they are in fact quite useful. But there's only so much utility in a sieve.

We are going to need positive theories of the mind, and we will have to build them using terms and bits that avoid confrontation with the old guard. So, maybe instead of "mind" we will say "artilect"[^2][^3], and then move on to engineer desirable properties. For some of those properties ("alignment", "paucity", Kantian analysis and synthesis) we are already there or aiming for, but as we design to take on more and more challenging deeds, we may need to go back, steal and rebrand other old ideas. For example, "long term goals" and "self-preservation" are strongly linked in humans. Can we reify that relationship in the new artilects we make?

Other things we will need to make from whole cloth. For example, minds with an intuitive understanding of, and capability to manipulate: quantum mechanics, biological organisms, the workings of an ecosystem, the stock market, a stock company, or itself and other minds.

[^1]: YMMV, depending on where you draw the line between fine intelligence and stochastic parrots.

[^2]: Not the dictionary meaning, but the term as used by Alastair Reynolds in "Blue Remembered Earth (2012)"

[^3]: We may not use the term "LLM", because of the stochastic parrot crowd, because LLMs become one of many ingredients, or simply (but unlikely) because we find a completely different tool for the kit and discard LLMs entirely.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#40

Post by eszed » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #36

eszed wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Furthermore, when I write precisely - because it's an important subject (read: will cost the company money) where we must be on the same page - people's eyes glaze over, and they ask for a meeting or a phone call instead. So, we do that, and I answer all the questions, and then everyone goes away with a different idea about what we're talking about. The only person who doesn't do that is our controller, who'll t…

I realize this may sounds like a lot of effort, but I find telling stories of how a person would use the system, with theatrics of confusion and failure, tend to penetrate the dull unwilling to think participants I must engage to get my work completed. I'm not an actor or a good speaker, I grew up with a severe stutter, and I find I have to "put on a show" to generate the dawn of comprehension in others.

Funnily enough, I am (was) an actor. Public speaking and telling stories are my jam. So... I do all that. I love making wacky analogies to help people understand complex systems.

Higher-level decision-making, I find, isn't so much like that. Sometimes it's just tradeoffs: "if the company's going this direction, then A is better; but if that, then B". But they haven't even recognized the this and the that - and don't want to think them through transparently - so I've got to choose the A or the B in the dark. Actually, it's worse than that, because some people have (by implication) already committed to the this, and others to the that, but neither side wants to talk about either, because that would create conflict. So, the best (job- / career-wise) choice for me is to predict which of A or B best satisfies whichever side will be most influential when the bill for A or B comes due. Either could be (technically speaking) correct, but the choice is never made on a technical basis.