But it's not what the bots are learning that's exciting--it's how they're learning. POET generates the obstacle courses, assesses the bots' abilities, and assigns their next challenge, all without human involvement. Step by faltering step, the bots improve via trial and error. "At some point it might jump over a cliff like a kung fu master," says Wang. It may seem basic at the moment, but for Wang and a handful of other researchers, POET hints at a revolutionary new way to create supersmart machines: by getting AI to make itself. Wang's former colleague Jeff Clune is among the biggest boosters of this idea. Clune has been working on it for years, first at the University of Wyoming and then at Uber AI Labs, where he worked with Wang and others. Now dividing his time between the University of British Columbia and OpenAI, he has the backing of one of the world's top artificial-intelligence labs. Clune calls the attempt to build truly intelligent AI the most ambitious scientific quest in human history.

RELAX: the AI apocalypse has been cancelled. A rash of recent headlines blared that Google was developing a "kill switch to stop a robot uprising against humans", as The Telegraph put it, with a picture of a menacing metal army. It may come as little surprise to learn that the technical paper on which the stories were based described a prosaic engineering problem, not ways to stop the Terminator in its tracks. But the excitable coverage reveals how deeply the challenges posed by artificial intelligence have seeped into public consciousness. We have had machines that can out-calculate us for decades. Now a new wave is outperforming us on tasks ranging from image recognition to video-gaming.