MIT's David Bau Challenges Gates, Hinton, Bengio: Show Me One Unthinkable Thought
davidbau · x · 2026-11-06
MIT professor David Bau pushes back against the fashionable claim from Bill Gates, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio that AI will soon think beyond humanity's grasp, as incomprehensible to us as we are to monkeys. His challenge: produce a single example of an unthinkable thought.
His argument rests on the universal Turing machine: anyone selling a 'super computer' that computes the incomputable must first name a problem regular computers cannot solve. He argues the defeatist narrative is harmful—students are planning their futures around it and learning to offload their thinking to AI—concluding that these top thinkers are wrong on this point, with major implications for what humanity should do.
More from AGI Musings
- Hassabis: AI now boosts engineers 3-5x, but closed-loop self-improvement is the risky next phase — haider1 · 2026-11-06
- 5 months of university report work in 2021 is now one deep research query away — gaganghotra_ · 2026-11-06
- Schmidhuber: Mind Uploads Won't Stay Human—They'll Evolve Beyond Recognition — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-11-06
- Dan Shipper's closing note: what humans should keep doing as AI takes over work — kieranklaassen · 2026-11-06
- AI Book Club picks "The New Dark Ages": AI accelerates the post-literate society — LuizaJarovsky · 2026-11-06
- AI assistants are moving into WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack as the new interface — dumay_sacha · 2026-11-06