While Danny Hillis was an undergraduate at MIT, he built a computer out of Tinkertoys

While Danny Hillis was an undergraduate at MIT, he built a computer out of Tinkertoys. It has around 10,000 wooden parts, plays tic-tac-toe, and never loses; it’s now in the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1980s, Danny designed a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” Maybe “despite” is the wrong word, since Feynman had a well-known predilection for playing with dopey ideas. In the event, he showed up on the day the company was incorporated and stayed on, for summer jobs and special assignments, to make invaluable contributions to its work. Danny has since established a number of technology companies, of which the latest is Applied Invention, which partners with commercial enterprises to develop technological solutions to their most intractable problems. He holds hundreds of U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and a slew of electronic and mechanical devices. His imagination is apparently boundless, and here he sketches some possible scenarios that will result from our pursuit of a better and better Al. “Our thinking machines are more than metaphors,” he says. “The question is not, ‘Will they be powerful enough to hurt us?’ (they will), or whether they will always act in our best interests (they won't), but whether over the long term they can help us find our way—where we come out on the Panacea/Apocalypse continuum. ” 120 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016923