AI will soon 'evolve' like humans – and civilisation as we know it will change forever

There's no reason why machines cannot be curious and creative Subscribe to WIRED ADVERTISEMENT When I was a teenager in the 70s, my goal was to build a self-improving AI smarter than myself, then retire. So I studied maths and computer science. For the cover of my 1987 diploma thesis, I drew a robot that bootstraps itself in seemingly impossible fashion. The thesis was very ambitious and described the first concrete research on a self-rewriting "meta-program" which not only learns to improve its performance in some limited domain, but also learns to improve the learning algorithm itself, and the way it meta-learns the way it learns. Read more How to build an artificial brain This was the first in a decades-spanning series of papers on algorithms for recursive self-improvement, with the goal of building a super- intelligence.