PERSON

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The seventeenth-century polymath who authored the founding program of artificial intelligence—the dream that all reasoning could be mechanized and disputes settled by calculation—and who, in the same breath, raised the deepest objection to it: that a machine one could walk inside would contain only parts that push one another, and never anything that perceives.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716, barely mourned, his greatest projects unfinished. He had invented the calculus before Newton published it; he had built the first calculator to perform all four arithmetic operations; he had proposed a universal symbolic language in which all human knowledge could be expressed and all disputes resolved by computation—and he had written, in a short piece of dense metaphysics, the thought experiment that remains the sharpest challenge to the dream he spent his life building. The thought experiment asks us to imagine a thinking machine enlarged until we can walk inside it like a mill. We enter, inspect every mechanism, and find what Leibniz predicted: only parts that push one another, and “never anything by which one could explain a perception.” The dream and its limit, authored by the same extraordinary mind, three hundred

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