Irving Good's 1965 quote predicted the intelligence explosion 60 years before AGI hype
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-18
The author shares Irving J. Good's famous 1965 passage defining an "ultraintelligent machine" — what we now call AGI — and notes the amusingly old-fashioned English and the term "ultraintelligent." Good argued that since designing machines is itself an intellectual activity, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines, leading unavoidably to an "intelligence explosion" that would leave human intelligence far behind. The quote is the origin of the intelligence explosion concept, showing AGI's intellectual roots predate today's debates by over half a century.
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