Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the most uncomfortable ancestor artificial intelligence has: the man who did more than anyone to make the thinking machine possible also gave us, three centuries in advance, the clearest diagnosis of what it would still be missing. He invented binary arithmetic not as a curiosity but as a philosophical revelation—that an astonishing richness of structure can be generated from the barest possible distinction between 0 and 1—and every device on earth now represents the world in exactly those two characters. He built the stepped reckoner, a mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and wrote the founding charter of automation: it is unworthy of excellent people to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation that a machine could safely do. He dreamed a characteristica universalis—a universal language of reason so precise that every dispute could be settled by computation, by simply saying calculemus—a dream that is the taproot of