Innovation
Mar 19, 2026
Carl Benedikt Frey
Listen to leading voices in Silicon Valley, and you might come to believe that “solving intelligence” is sufficient to “solve everything else.” But as seductive as this claim about AI’s potential may be, it rests on a number of assumptions that do not withstand scrutiny.
OXFORD – In the mid-1960s, the mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptographer I.J. Good proposed a thought experiment that has since become the secular gospel of Silicon Valley. If we were to build an “ultraintelligent machine,” he argued, it could then design even better machines, sparking an intelligence explosion that would leave human cognition far behind. The first such machine, therefore, would be “the last invention that man need ever make.”
