In Possible Minds, Frank Wilczek is one of 25 thought leaders who address the promise and peril of AI. Here are three of his most influential observations:

1. “Francis Crick called it ‘the Astonishing Hypothesis’: That consciousness, also known as Mind, is an emergent property of matter,” which, if true, indicates that “all intelligence is machine intelligence. What distinguishes natural from artificial intelligence is not what it is, but only how it is made.”

2. “Artificial intelligence is not the product of an alien invasion. It is an artifact of a particular human culture and reflects the values of that culture.”

3. “David Hume’s striking statement, ‘Reason is, and Ought only to be, the Slave of the Passions’ was written in 1738 [and] was, of course, meant to apply to human reason and human passions…But Hume’s logical/philosophical point remains valid for AI. Simply put: Incentives, not abstract logic, drive behavior.”

* * *

Here are Wilczek’s concluding thoughts: “In a moving passage from his 1935 novel Odd John, science fiction’s singular genius Olaf Stapledon has his hero, a superhuman, (mutant) intelligence, describe Homo sapiens as ‘the Archaeopteryx of the spirit.’ He said this fondly to his friend and biographer, who is a normal human. Archaeopteryx was a noble creature, and a bridge to greater ones.”

* * *

Frank Wilczek is Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, and the author of A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design.

Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, Edited by John Brockman, was published by Penguin Press/An imprint of Penguin Random House (February 2019)