Since the time of Leibniz, we have been waiting for machines to begin to think. Before Turing’s Universal Machines colonized our desktops, we had a less-encumbered view of the form in which true artificial intelligence would first appear. “Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?” asked Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. “Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it?” In 1950, Turing asked us to “consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ ” Machines will dream first.
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