PERSON
Michio Kaku
The theoretical physicist who turned consciousness into a number—and whose space-time
theory of mind, Kardashev civilizational scale, and Cave Man Principle together force artificial intelligence onto the same measuring instrument as every other known form of awareness.
Michio Kaku built a particle accelerator in his Palo Alto garage as a teenager, drawing twenty-two miles of copper wire into a magnetic field powerful enough to dim the neighbourhood lights. The story has been told so often it has worn smooth, but it contains the whole man: the boundary between the cosmic and the domestic, between the unreachable and the buildable, simply did not exist for him. As a co-founder of string field theory he spent the first half of his career at the frontier of theoretical physics; he spent the second half insisting that the same physics governing colliding galaxies also governs the three pounds of wet matter behind our eyes—and that both are, in the end, engineering problems. His definition of
consciousness as “the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters—in temperature, space, time, and in relation to others—in order to accomplish a goal” is the most