PERSON
I. J. Good
The British cryptologist and statistician who, in a single 1965 paragraph, founded the modern debate about machine superintelligence—coining the intelligence explosion, naming the control problem in a subordinate clause, and spending the rest of his long life revising his estimate of whether humanity would survive it.
Good is the man who wrote the last invention. In 1965, a working mathematician who had spent the most intense years of his life breaking German naval ciphers beside
Alan Turing in Hut 8 at Bletchley Park published four sentences that founded an entire field. He defined an ultraintelligent machine as one that surpasses all the intellectual activities of any human, however clever; observed that since machine design is itself an intellectual activity, such a machine could design even better machines; concluded that there would “unquestionably” be an intelligence explosion leaving human intelligence far behind; and named the result “the last invention that man need ever make.” The sentence did not end there. It continued: “provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” The entire modern conversation about AI alignment—about
corrigibility, about takeoff speeds, about whether we are summoning a