Twenty years ago next month, a loveless coder called Mark Zuckerberg spun up a “hot or not” website to rate the looks of his female classmates at Harvard. Today, he is one of the richest men on earth, lords over an empire of nearly four billion people and recently unveiled a stunningly ambitious plan to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Enthusiasts believe that the latter — if it is indeed achievable — would be “humanity’s last invention”, a system superior to humans at virtually every cognitive task and capable of solving the world’s most vexing challenges, from climate change to cancer.
Whether AGI is in fact achievable and not a science-fiction fantasy is the subject of much debate. But Zuckerberg’s hope is that he will
