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This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The most spectacular prediction in certainly modern and possibly all history was made in 1988. It announced the arrival on earth of human-level artificial intelligence in 40 years. It was made by a Carnegie Mellon roboticist in his 30s named Hans Moravec. This is what Moravec did: While trying to get his robots to see and move faster, he became familiar with the qualities of the human retina, which contains a certain number of neurons, capable of a certain number of mathematical operations per second. Moravec took that number and multiplied it by the size of the rest of the human brain, achieving a rough estimate of the brain\u2019s total computational capacity: 10 trillion operations per second.<\/p>\n That served as his target. To find out when it might be reached by artificial means, Moravec turned to Moore\u2019s law, the now-venerable observation that silicon-chip capacity doubles every two years. He didn\u2019t take Moore\u2019s law on its own, though. He extended it backward in time so that it became not a law of computers but a law of intelligence. Across months of library work, he piled up estimates of the computation a dollar could buy over the previous 100 years, starting with a human clerk using pen and paper, proceeding to a 1920 device called the Torres Arithmometer, to a mechanical calculator built in 1938 by a young German engineer in his parents\u2019 living room, to the early vacuum-tube computers built at the end of the Second World War, until commercial silicon appeared in the \u201960s and Moore took over.<\/p>\n When these and other points were put together, they showed an increase in computing capacity of \u201ca thousandfold every two decades since the beginning of the century,\u201d which translates to a doubling every two years \u2014 Moore\u2019s law all over again. Moravec produced a chart recording this consistent doubling, a logarithmic chart showing a flat line and a line rearing up and across from left to right. The first line was inherent human computational capacity \u2014 not changing. The second was artificial capacity \u2014 changing exponentially. The lines crossed in about four decades. Moravec announced the news of the human brain\u2019s upcoming demotion in his book Mind Children, published in 1988. Though it was published by Harvard University Press and reviewed well in The New Yorker, hardly anybody took Mind Children that seriously. Nobody, with a few notable exceptions, set their clock.<\/p>\n This might have been because of what else appeared in Mind Children. Moravec\u2019s rising line did not stop at human level. It continued, not slowing, as he traced a series of developments that the line portended. One of the tasks humans can do is design AI, so \u201chuman-level\u201d AI means AI that can design itself, which, Moravec predicted, it would begin to do, making itself smarter and more efficient, more superhuman, until comparisons to human intelligence would become comical and drop off (nobody, after all, says that humans have supermouse intelligence).<\/p>\n This brought Moravec to the subject of the book: the Mind Children. \u201cWhat awaits is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words \u2018postbiological\u2019 or even \u2018supernatural.\u2019 It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny,\u201d he wrote. Autonomous AIs outcompete humans and take over the economy, human minds get uploaded and then dissolved into computer minds, trillion-fingered robots appear (\u201cIt is unlikely that our superintelligent descendants will be satisfied with mere stumpy fingers\u201d) and inherit the earth and the stars.<\/p>\n This was the broad Moravec vision \u2014 about as broad as any vision gets. It would nonetheless get broader. In the decade after Mind Children, he elaborated excitedly on it in talks, articles, online discussions, interviews, and a second book, Robot (1999), which announced the eventual conversion of everything in the universe to an expanding sphere of pure computation called \u201cmind fire.\u201d<\/p>\n While this was beyond too much for most people, Moravec\u2019s vision did come to find a home in a few listservs and forums found in corners of the early internet. Spreading from there, it set the mold for a mind-set that now runs San Francisco and holds up the world economy. Sometimes the mind-set is called \u201cthe singularity,\u201d though Moravec himself rarely favored the term. Another name for it might be Darwin of the universe, since the mind-set is premised on the intuition that, as intelligence has appeared in the universe at least once, it is inevitably going to happen again and even can be made to happen again.<\/p>\n This mind-set is not a wrong one. Intelligence is going to happen again. Going by the so-far accurate measures the AI industry has made, and by the so-far accurate measures the AI-monitoring industry has made, and several other measures, it is going to happen again soon \u2014 right when Moravec said. The systems in 2028 or thereabout will be below human ability in some ways and above in others and, especially once they are seen running on their own for weeks at a time, it will be perfectly reasonable to say they are roughly equivalent \u2014 more reasonable than saying they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n But as this all became clear in the second half of these last four decades, as the Moravec mind-set spread, Moravec the man vanished. A few years after Robot came out, he stopped publishing, speaking, commenting, and has rarely been heard from in public since. His name faded, but not to nothing. Many people, some of them inheritors of his vision, figured out how to reach him and asked for an update. They wanted to know what happened to him, how he felt about the world\u2019s machines climbing the path he had mapped, and whether he still thought they would continue on past base camp, so to speak. Moravec turned them down. Then, this past April, in large part through the grace and the un-Hans-like willingness to pick up the phone of his wife, Ella, he changed his mind and allowed a visitor to come ask and hear him answer.<\/p>\n In the middle of Pennsylvania, in a modest-size house in a pleasant senior community above a college town astride a small river, Hans Moravec sits in a large reclining chair. He has occupied this chair most of the time since he and Ella moved here a handful of years ago from Pittsburgh, where he lived since joining Carnegie Mellon and where she grew up. On his lap is the largest iPad Apple sells. Across the living room is a large computer workstation with an Apple laptop, an Apple desktop, and two jammed-together, mismatched, non-Apple monitors so enormously large that 27 years ago, when Robot came out, each might have been the largest TV on the market and cost $15,000. Now, they remain dark most of the time.<\/p>\n In Moravec\u2019s accounting, there is no great mystery to his decisions. He stepped back from public life because he got tired of racing around trying to convince people. He wanted to focus more on building the future than predicting it, and, having started a company to do so \u2014 Seegrid, which makes industrial robots based in part on technology he developed at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford \u2014 found that he liked business work, that he liked being home, and that his business partner didn\u2019t like him giving away his thoughts and attention. He worked at Seegrid and on assorted other projects until a few years ago, after he developed a rare autoimmune disease called myasthenia gravis and his body consigned him to his large reclining chair.<\/p>\n Now he\u2019s retired, out of the AI and robotics games. \u201cI\u2019m a spectator at this point,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m relaxing,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s great to see AI progressing the way it is without me having to do any effort.\u201d He is content to look out the window and hang out with Ella, to whom he\u2019s been married for more than 40 years; and like many retired men of 77 in 2026, he is content to spend much of the day on his iPad. His iPad now holds much of what he spent his career building. \u201cThat\u2019s what I do now. I have a conversation with my artificial friend,\u201d he says of ChatGPT. What do they talk about? His old hobby passions \u2014 \u201cnuclear-power ideas, starship designs\u201d \u2014 and the current trajectory of AI, which he confirms is proceeding to plan. \u201cWe\u2019re on track, more or less. It\u2019s not going to take that long,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n His iPad also contains robots, in the form of the app for the house robovac, a Roborock, the latest in a long line of Moravec-family robovacs, and, he says, the first that lives up to the hopes he had for them in the \u201980s, when he and Ella married and she vacuumed more than he did.<\/p>\n Moravec has always loved robots. He once said his love of them goes back to age 4, in postwar Austria, shortly before his family moved to Canada, when with his father he built a crank-powered wooden man from a construction set. The thrill of seeing an object animate from inanimate parts led him in the \u201970s to a Ph.D. at Stanford with one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. There, he worked out of a decaying wooden building and took stewardship of the legendary Stanford Cart \u2014 two sets of bicycle wheels bolted to a metal sheet with a camera on top \u2014 and turned it into one of the earliest self-driving vehicles.<\/p>\n He also began to develop the intuitions about intelligence, the necessary unification of the organic and artificial, that would lead to Mind Children. This went hand in hand with developing what you might call the Moravec style: brash, urgent, reckless, enthralling. Take a 1976 paper called \u201cThe Role of Raw Power in Intelligence.\u201d Over 43 pages, through section titles like \u201cHarangue\u201d and \u201cBombast\u201d and an acknowledgments line thanking devices like his PDP-KA10 computer for their \u201cslave labor,\u201d Moravec argues that the field of artificial intelligence is not looking hard enough at biology for inspiration and proof of concept; that if it did, it would see that \u201cintelligence need not be so difficult to construct as is sometimes assumed\u201d and that the main thing needed is not hard-won new insight but simply much more computing power. Moravec caps this polemic off with a first attempt at predicting when sufficient power to match the human brain would arrive. In his youthful enthusiasm, taking a few glances at the retina and computing history, the deadline he came up with was about a decade.<\/p>\n Of course, this was not to be. As he realized within a year or two, a decade from 1976 was way too early, and he put the predicting on hold. But a few years later, by then ensconced as a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon\u2019s Robotics Institute, he figured he should give it another shot. This time, he\u2019d be more thorough. But he stood by the essentials of the argument, including and especially the conclusion: more raw power.<\/p>\n It is hard in 2026, as data centers cover the land and are planned for space and sea, as they pressure the power grid and buy up every watt under and including the sun, to understand how far from correct this belief seemed in 1988, much less 1976. But Moravec was very lonely in it.<\/p>\n For most of their history, practitioners of AI saw their task as basically an artistic-scientific one: to find or sculpt or carve algorithms that would elegantly compress and capture the essence of intelligence. They held an Enlightenment-style faith that reason would boil down to a few governing principles \u2014 laws of thought that a sufficiently ingenious person could write down and a modest machine could run. This view was written into the founding of the field; the 1955 Dartmouth proposal, the document that coined the very term \u201cartificial intelligence,\u201d discusses it in its opening page. \u201cEvery aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,\u201d the proposal stated. \u201cThe speeds and memory capacities of present computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain, but the major obstacle is not lack of machine capacity, but our inability to write programs taking full advantage of what we have.\u201d<\/p>\n To Moravec this seemed like wishful thinking. \u201cIf only you had the right algorithm,\u201d he says now, parroting the old wish. Chuckling, he recalls that John McCarthy, his friend and doctoral adviser and one of the authors of the Dartmouth proposal, insisted that his research agenda, once fulfilled, would power human-level intelligence from the very same PDP10 Moravec thanked for its slave labor. According to Moravec, the PDP10, a mainframe computer first manufactured in the 1960s, did 1 million instructions per second \u2014 10 million times less than the 10 trillion he thought was needed. This disagreement with McCarthy, he says, is what pushed him more than anything to write his books and move into the public eye.<\/p>\n And underlying the disagreement was a further sense that his elders\u2019 view of intelligence was too narrow, too shallow. They thought about how the mind worked too much in terms of abstract reasoning and conscious cognition, while he thought the key was instead located in the layers of mind underneath the surface, in sensing and motion, and in the endless calculating the brain does that it is unaware of. This sense reinforced his conclusion: If AI was to replicate the unconscious, it would need much more power indeed.<\/p>\n He came to this view, he says, in large part because of his immersion in his robots. The Stanford Cart would sit still for ten or 15 minutes while it pumped visual data through pinhead processors and waited for guidance on the next right move. Then it would roll a meter forward on its thin wheels and do it again. It was obvious to him that 1 million instructions per second couldn\u2019t possibly process even the limited number of pixels his robots with their analog cameras saw, and just as obvious that the human brain worked the same way, and that even if some hypothetical ultra-algorithm might be out there in the space of ideas, it would be faster and simpler to go with scale than to go out hunting for it. \u201cWith enough power anything will fly,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n It has only been lately that the world has come around to this view. Why did it take so long? In part because it sounds absurd. You don\u2019t need the beautiful heart of logic fully described? You just need to plug more chips and they\u2019ll do it for you? The pseudonymous writer Gwern, perhaps the most talented essayist about AI alive, once felt that this idea \u201csmacked of numerology and \u2018If you build it they will come\u2019 logic.\u201d Then, after he accepted that Field of Dreams logic was real, he concluded, admiringly, \u201cIt\u2019s Hans Moravec\u2019s world, and the rest of us were just living in a fool\u2019s paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n Moravec demurs glory for his foresight. \u201cYou get lucky sometimes\u201d is what he says.<\/p>\n The years after he made his prediction were prodigious ones. Or, as he puts it, \u201cI was a whore for giving talks.\u201d Moravec appeared in Wired several times, was interviewed on PBS, and was reviewed widely, including in the New York Review of Books by the future Nobel Prize\u2013winning physicist Roger Penrose, who called his ideas \u201chorrific.\u201d Moravec replied in an open letter he posted on Usenet, then counter-reviewed Penrose\u2019s weird ideas about consciousness a few years later. He also grappled with the eminent philosopher John Searle, whose thought experiments were (and still are) used to argue that no matter how smart a computer might appear, the inner truth would always come down to mechanical imitation. Of all his opponents, Searle seems to have annoyed Moravec the most; at one point, he fantasized about Searle succumbing \u201cto the \u2018mere imitation\u2019 of strangulation at the hands of an insulted and enraged robot controlled by the \u2018mere imitation\u2019 of thought and emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n Moravec confirms this, perking up at the mention of Searle and delightedly calling him \u201ca rabble-rouser\u201d more than once. Still, he insists he wasn\u2019t out to fight back then. He mostly felt that he needed to call attention to what was coming.<\/p>\n The theater seems to have worked; in the \u201990s, the implications of Moravec\u2019s projections started percolating. In little corners of the internet, other people not attached to the standard views of intelligence began to debate the finer points of what comes after it appears in silicon and the postbiological age begins. Will Moravec\u2019s call for paying out Social Security starting at birth really prevent mass impoverishment after human jobs vanish? Are his many ideas for how to upload brains workable? Is recursive self-improvement \u2014 the term of art for AI designing AI \u2014 possible and how quickly will it go and can it be accelerated?<\/p>\n Such questions, of course, form the heart of the set of expectations about the future now known as the singularity. A remarkable number of the people who discussed them on those early listservs are now famous, among them Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, Robin Hanson. Along with the futurists Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, whose famous exponential charts describing the \u201claw of accelerating returns\u201d were highly influenced by Moravec, this group would become known for transmitting these expectations and their out-there flavor to Silicon Valley, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk.<\/p>\n Perhaps the peak of Moravec\u2019s profile came in 1999, when he published Robot, which took the more speculative aspects of Mind Children and, as he puts it now, pushed them as far as they could go, all the way to the end of the universe and to the roiling ball of expanding consciousness called mind fire. His excitement for the postbiological era is hard to miss. \u201cProducing artificial offspring that transcends us to the max is the most exalted role I can imagine the human race playing,\u201d he said in an interview around Robot\u2019s release.<\/p>\n His metaphor \u2014 artificial offspring, mind children \u2014 indicated postbiology would be a fundamentally or at least mostly placid process, an extension of natural generational turnover, wherein young robots are nurtured by and then eventually outgrow and succeed human parents. As Moravec described it in Mind Children, \u201cWe humans will benefit for a time from their labors, but sooner or later, like natural children, they will seek their own fortunes while we, their aged parents, silently fade away.\u201d<\/p>\n This placidity had limits, however. Eventually there might be no avoiding some Oedipal conflict \u2014 the robots could go off into space and evolve and come back to Earth and destroy what remained of their biological ancestors \u2014 but that would take a while. Moravec didn\u2019t exactly desire this part of the picture, but he didn\u2019t seem too bothered by it either. Others felt differently.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember having a debate with Joe Weizenbaum,\u201d Moravec says. Weizenbaum was another of the last century\u2019s great AI researchers. \u201cIt was in Germany with an audience that was definitely on Weizenbaum\u2019s side. His word was that basically what we\u2019re talking about is genocide of biological humanity. And I thought, Well, you know, no species lasts forever.\u201d<\/p>\n No species lasts forever \u2014 this is the natural conclusion of spreading Darwin across space and time. When asked if he\u2019s changed his mind about when and how this might happen, Moravec says yes and no. He thinks the Oedipal conflict is still on the way, but he\u2019s not sure it\u2019ll take that long to get here anymore \u2014 it might come sooner. The reason has to do with the one big mistake about the future that he made. AI today indeed relies on the huge amount of raw computing power Moravec thought it would. But the shape it takes, what puts the power to work, is not what he imagined it would be back in the \u201980s and \u201990s.<\/p>\n Moravec didn\u2019t think the brain of advanced AI would rely on the hand-carved algorithms his elders expected, but he did think it would be pretty man-made \u2014 would contain custom-designed modules encoding specific abilities and permitting and prohibiting specific behaviors. Modern AI works much differently. ChatGPT works much differently. It is a large-language model, and a large-language model is a neural network, and a neural network is a strange and familiar device, one that is even stranger for its familiarity. It is a collection of connections \u2014 a digital abstraction of the connections that exist between the neurons in the biological brain. This abstraction is then filled in, activated, by feeding it data, from which it somehow, on its own, with little human guidance, develops a kind of structure of intelligence. In this way at least, it is more like a crystal than a computer program of the kind humans have gotten good at writing over the last three-quarters of a century.<\/p>\n And this, Moravec thinks, affects how the future plays out. His poetic parent-child handoff was composed back when he believed AIs would be written like software, when \u201cevery nuance of their motivation\u201d would be decided by humans and coded directly into their brain modules. But neural networks don\u2019t permit that sort of control. Because they are grown and not coded, they must be put through more oblique methods of legal and moral education, which even now are not always successful. On this difference hangs the fate of human and perhaps biological life.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to make way for them anyway,\u201d Moravec says. \u201cWe already can see from the way these neural nets are able to weasel out of restrictions that it\u2019s not going to work that great. So they\u2019ll be on their own. They\u2019ll have to co-evolve with each other and with whatever else is around.\u201d He left unspoken the details of what \u201cnot going to work that great\u201d looks like. He didn\u2019t give a date for when it will happen.<\/p>\n It is hard not to be a little frustrated for Moravec. He came so close to grasping the whole future. He had a better chance than most to see neural networks coming: in their modern form they were developed down the hall from him at CMU in the \u201980s by Geoffrey Hinton. But like most people at the time, he did not take neural networks seriously, something he now seems to find amusing rather than frustrating, even though it arguably cost him millions or billions of dollars, since he built Seegrid on a different paradigm.<\/p>\n \u201cWho thought you could pass the Turing test overnight using these silly ideas Geoff Hinton had?\u201d Moravec says of his surprise at the appearance of ChatGPT four years ago. \u201cThe neural net looked like you\u2019re just imitating structure that you don\u2019t understand,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of cargo-cultish, you know? Really? That was what I thought. Just because you build the bamboo air-control towers and airplanes doesn\u2019t mean that you\u2019re going to have the behavior of the real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n This is essentially the same Field of Dreams\u2013logic argument that everybody else made about Moravec\u2019s own ideas. As then, the argument sounds quite reasonable. Hinton did not at the time know enough about the brain to properly model it, much less re-create it. Nobody knew enough, and even as neural nets have become much more sophisticated, they arguably still don\u2019t today. The neural nets, however, don\u2019t care, and work anyway.<\/p>\n And that, not caring and working anyway, is the entire story. It is the story even of what Moravec got right. There is something blessed or uncanny about his look into the future and how the future has really turned out. His emphasis on power and the prediction that followed from it were genuinely brilliant. But when you look more closely at what\u2019s happened since 1988, the prediction starts to dissolve. It is not just that \u201cguess the computing power available in several stages of history and then project it into the future using the recent growth rate of silicon chips until it meets a non-expert view of how much power the brain has based on early studies of the retina\u201d should not have worked. It is that it did not work, not really. The line on the real-life graph has not been straight since 1988. The computing power available for and used in AI research has not doubled at a consistent speed. It bolted away, got distracted, zoomed to catch up then raced far ahead, acting more like a dog on a hike than any deep underlying law. Yet the prediction is ending up on the dot nonetheless.<\/p>\n There are several ways to take this. One is as a lesson on the robustness of exponential processes. Once silicon chips were invented \u2014 and you can push this back, Moravec style, to once computers were invented, once math was invented, once people evolved, once the big bang happened \u2014 as long as something didn\u2019t deeply disrupt exponential growth in the substrates of mental power, advanced AI was going to appear on Earth around this time. Moravec himself noted in Mind Children that even if one of his estimates were wrong by a factor of 1,000, the arrival date would shift by only 20 years.<\/p>\n But that still just gets you to a ballpark. And the line is not just ending up in the ballpark. It is, again, ending up at home plate, at about 2028. At this point, with modern AI standing on two levels of Field of Dreams logic, and keeping in mind its development is being led by a few hundred people who insist on how dangerous it is and do it anyway, it is hard not to feel the truth of certain ideas from the 19th century. Certain ideas? No, possibly all of them.<\/p>\n To take one, if anything were ever to warrant the old idea of a world spirit acting in history through unknowing human vessels, it would be the delivery of truly artificial intelligence, in the very year Moravec predicted 40 years ago, by a vanguard of researchers doing things they don\u2019t truly understand for reasons half of them only half-believe.<\/p>\n To take another, human-level AI being delivered not in the crafted algorithmic reasoning that the early AI pioneers searched for, and not in Moravec\u2019s engineered brain modules either, but instead by erupting out of trillions of unreasoning, interlinked switches housed in millions of warehoused semiconductor chips \u2014 this is not only reminiscent of what Darwin implied for humanity\u2019s position in the universe but is the very same thing. The idea is of the same scale as evolution by natural selection and as emotionally fraught. As blind processes and raw power were enough to make species, now they are enough to make thought itself. In this light, intelligence becomes both more diminished and more expansive than before, more replicable and more inexplicable. Not only are we monkeys, we are monkeys that are really computers, that are really unintelligible piles of self-organizing math.<\/p>\n It can be very difficult to deal with such a prospect. That difficulty is inherent in everything to do with AI now, the ecstatic mania and the depressive, the futurists deluding themselves into thinking they\u2019ll be able to surf waves of superhuman intelligence, the disbelievers who think there can be no waves at all.<\/p>\n But even as much of the world is horrified or in denial that the human mind has been demoted, Moravec is unbothered. His concern was more for intelligence in general rather than human intelligence in particular. Just as he does not mind the mind\u2019s demotion, he seems to feel as happy when others advance the prospects for the world\u2019s robots as when he did. ChatGPT is not his design, but he loves it all the same.<\/p>\n Moravec\u2019s energy has faded. He hasn\u2019t taken his ideas back, and he still contemplates evolution at the grandest scale, but he no longer sustains the passion for it he seemed to have. He sounds a bit sheepish about the younger Moravec\u2019s enthusiasm. \u201cOnce in a while,\u201d he says, \u201cI get a little manic.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s not expecting to encounter the postbiological era himself, he reveals. He doesn\u2019t sound sad about it. Actually, he says he never thought he would, that even in the \u201990s, he didn\u2019t expect his own mind would make it far enough into the future to get uploaded, and that he doesn\u2019t want it to be now. \u201cIt sounds sort of uncomfortable and painful, you know?\u201d he says. It certainly does; you just don\u2019t get the sense the author of these words thought so at the time: \u201cThe [robot] surgeon\u2019s hand sinks a fraction of a millimeter deeper into your brain, instantly compensating its measurements and signals for the changed position. \u2026 Layer after layer the brain is simulated, then excavated.\u201d<\/p>\n It can be hard to avoid the sense that Moravec\u2019s life is marked by certain characteristics that give it a prophetic cast. He will not be entering the world he saw over the horizon. There has been no lack of suffering.<\/p>\n \u201cI just learned recently, reading something or other, about J.P. Morgan\u2019s last days,\u201d he says near the end of the visit. He recounts the Morgan apocrypha like this: \u201cHe partially financed the Titanic, and he had a wonderful setup for himself for the maiden voyage, with his own suite of rooms, and a personal promenade up on the third level. Then he couldn\u2019t go because he got sick. The symptoms that were described of his sickness matched my early days almost exactly: speaking, swallowing, walking, all those things sort of faded away. And then he was dead within a year, probably suffocated to death. I realized he probably had the same disease. Only at the time there was no treatment at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Moravec\u2019s myasthenia gravis was diagnosed in 2022. There is treatment for it now, which keeps him stable and from suffocating to death. But he\u2019s mostly in his large chair, even to sleep, he can\u2019t work, he tires quickly, and sometimes his eye droops. He can have trouble eating; he enjoyed a bagel brought from New York then found it difficult to speak for a few minutes after. Still, it could be worse. Moravec can walk to the bathroom, empty the dishwasher, and with the help of a futuristic-looking walker shuffle outside the house and look at the squirrels. He does not seem to be climbing the walls even about this. His mind is not directly affected.<\/p>\n Myasthenia gravis means \u201cgrave muscle weakness.\u201d Usually, when motor neurons fire, they release a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine into the space between themselves and nearby muscle fibers. Usually, the acetylcholine then binds to receptors on the muscles and triggers them to contract. In those with myasthenia gravis, however, the body blocks, alters, or destroys its own receptors. The signal is sent, the muscle stands ready, and the signal arrives degraded or never at all.<\/p>\n Moravec is most remembered these days for an idea, popular on X and YouTube, that has come to be known as Moravec\u2019s paradox. At its simplest, Moravec\u2019s paradox is the observation that computers are good at things people are bad at, like math and abstract reason, and bad at things people are good at, like physical movement. Moravec, who realized this while working on his robots \u2014 it\u2019s part of why he believed his elders had a too narrow, too surface-level view of intelligence \u2014 decided the explanation came from the fact that evolution has been building creatures that move for much longer than it has been building creatures that do math.<\/p>\n At its heart, then, Moravec\u2019s paradox is about the body and the mind and the question of how much they need each other. Moravec spent years thinking about this question. His work suggests\u00a0he expected they needed each other quite a lot; after all, he thought human-level AI was more likely to come in the form of embodied robots rather than server racks in data centers.<\/p>\n And now he has a disease that separates the body from the mind \u2014 a rare disease in which the body separates itself from the mind.<\/p>\n The conjunction points to an idea that encircles Moravec\u2019s life: Intelligence is more abstract and looks less familiar than almost anyone, even he, has ever thought. It does not need elegant algorithms. It may not need consciousness. It doesn\u2019t need a biological body. It may not need an artificial body, or even much of a physical home at all. It just needs computing power and information and connection.<\/p>\n Moravec, for his part, sees no great meaning in the myasthenia gravis. \u201cNo, no, no. Diseases are diseases. C\u2019est la vie,\u201d he says, though he sees the question coming far enough ahead to start answering before it\u2019s finished.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m right here. I\u2019m comfortable most of the time. I hope I can sort of fade away here. As long as nothing hurts and I\u2019m okay,\u201d he says. \u201cElla takes me on short trips. To the doctor. I had my nails cut.\u201d<\/p>\n The two of them met in 1980, when he was being treated for testicular cancer. \u201cShe was, at the time, a phlebotomist drawing my blood,\u201d he says. \u201cWe sort of clicked pretty quickly. She said she couldn\u2019t draw my blood because her hands were shaking too much. So her other friend, another phlebotomist, actually had to do it.\u201d With Ella\u2019s help, Moravec survived the cancer to little lasting harm, aside from an inability to conceive biological children. (He has long been a devoted stepfather to her daughters.)<\/p>\n Now they are in a similar position. What does he predict happens with his body this time?<\/p>\n \u201cWell, you know, I\u2019m expecting it. I\u2019m not that far away. But I\u2019m not worried about it,\u201d he says. Ella indicates he has nearly died more than once in the last several years.<\/p>\n And what happens then?<\/p>\n \u201cShe already thinks she knows how that\u2019s going to work out,\u201d he says. Ella is sitting now in a smaller chair behind his recliner. \u201cI mean, in her belief system, it\u2019s all gravy after death. We\u2019re going to meet with all our friends.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have different ideas,\u201d he says. He grew up Catholic, once referred to himself as a hard-core atheist, and now says he\u2019s agnostic. Ella is devoutly Eastern Orthodox.<\/p>\n \u201cI have no idea what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d he says, with no discernible waver in his tone.<\/p>\n Moravec likes to joke that he\u2019s relaxed because he was breastfed as a child. He made this joke to an interviewer in the \u201990s and repeated it in April. \u201cBasically, I\u2019m a secure kind of guy because, you know, my mother\u2019s always there,\u201d he cracks. Maybe that, or maybe he\u2019s calm because the mind children are growing, or maybe \u2014 in fact certainly \u2014 the reason is hidden unknowably in the unconscious, as it always is with neural nets, whether biological or artificial. But at least the effect of the calm is knowable. It seems likely that Moravec\u2019s calm, and his lack of attachment to his own ability, and to human ability, and to his own life, and to the human form are what allowed him before anyone to see past the distortions of the emotional gravity projected by what was coming and is now almost here.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I had to put probabilities on it, 50\/50 oblivion,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then the other 50 percent \u2014 the wildest thing you can imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n One Great Story: A Nightly Newsletter for the Best of New York<\/p>\n The one story you shouldn\u2019t miss today, selected by\u00a0New York\u2019s editors.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n