Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning, and one of the most celebrated scientists of our time, told a leading AI conference in Toronto in 2016.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger.

Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning, and one of the most celebrated scientists of our time, told a leading AI conference in Toronto in 2016.

In the eleventh century, St. Anselm of Canterbury proposed an argument for the existence of God that went roughly like this: God is, by definition, the greatest being that we can imagine; a God that doesn’t exist is clearly not as great as a God that does exist; ergo, God must exist.

A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills.

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race car and changed his life.

It has eight arms, three hearts — and a plan. Scientists aren’t sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent. To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside.

In the past few years, we’ve been deluged with discussions of how artificial intelligence (AI) will either save or destroy the world. Self-driving cars will keep us alive; social media bubbles will destroy democracy; robot toasters will rob us of our ability to heat bread.

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

It was a tense summer day in 1835 Japan. The country’s reigning Go player, Honinbo Jowa, took his seat across a board from a 25-year-old prodigy by the name of Akaboshi Intetsu. Both men had spent their lives mastering the two-player strategy game that’s long been popular in East Asia.

In 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave, Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a woodcut print known in English as ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ and in Japanese as ‘Tako to ama’, ‘Octopus and Shell Diver’.

Science fiction tells us that a change in a past event, caused by the intervention of a time traveler, will open up a parallel timeline that leads to an alternate present. The example that comes to mind, for some reason, is Back to the Future, Part II. After an unexpected disturbance in the spacetime continuum, Marty McFly visits a world in which Biff Tannen, his father’s high school bully, has gone from unscrupulous small-time businessman to a replica of our current president.

If you accept this idea, it raises the stakes of the present moment: each decision leads not to one inevitable outcome, but a multitude of possible futures. The passage of time isn’t a story, following a hero’s journey from “call to adventure” to “return home.” It’s a website with a series of links, each of which leads to a subsequent series of links. You may begin an evening by reading the Wikipedia entry for tulips or graham crackers, and, depending on the decisions you make, find yourself becoming an expert on Jeffrey Dahmer or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory by dawn. Unlike the linear media of the printed page, time branches out into alternate possibilities, corresponding to what sociologist Ted Nelson, anticipating the internet decades before its invention, named hypermedia.

Pop culture these days is awash in tales of AI run amok, from machines that act like humans to humans in love with machines. The reason seems clear enough: We're anxious about a world in which machines have superseded us. But it isn't just armchair philosophy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked about his thoughts on the cosmos. In a slow, gloomy voice, he intoned, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity, it’s trying to kill us. And so is Earth. From sinkholes to tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis.

One of the big trends we’ve seen over the last five years is automation. At the same time, we’re also seeing more intelligence built into tools we already have, like phones and computers. Where do you see this process in five years?

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological hardware – you’re using it now. Science and technology seem to be converging, from several directions, on the possibility of similar intelligence in non-biological systems.

Through the past few decades of summer blockbuster movies and Silicon Valley products, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly familiar and sexy, and imbued with a perversely dystopian allure.

In 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds.