The Space of Possible Minds

Nowhere could I find a shared, unified effort, analogous to the single-minded force that had patiently shaped the development of our own minds over the millennia. I couldn’t help but wonder what the world would be like if that changed—if researchers banded together to understand and re-create the core idea that seemed to lie at the very heart of hu

of the connections between them. They tapped into our millennia-old desire to understand the mind—indeed, to make sense of intelligence itself—wading further into abstraction than I’d ever ventured, all while they maintained an unmistakably humanistic thread. They exemplified the virtues of science—rigorous and hypothesis-driven—but without ever sa

“I think that really misses the point, mainly because, if you think about it, the most important thing we’re doing in this century is inventing our successors.” He thinks that most of the intelligence in the universe, abundant as it may be, is likely synthetic.

What if we, one day, will be as far behind cognitively, relatively, as cavemen are to us? Is there any reason to believe at all we have reached the peak of human consciousness and ability? The burden of proof is in many ways on those thinking we have somehow hit a ceiling than it is on anyone claiming we haven’t. What if one day we could actually w