He was one of just seven engineers who created Wolfram ResearchвЂ™s Mathematica, a powerful calculation system beloved by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians everywhere. He co-designed the computer languages StarLisp and Sather, both built for use in programming AI.

HeвЂ™s been a highly regarded professor of artificial intelligence, a prolific technical author, and a pioneer in AI milestones like lip reading and recognizing pictures. For Omohundro, it was the start of a career of making hard things look easy. He turned his thesis into the book Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics on the new developments in differential geometry. He met me at a restaurant in Palo Alto, the city next to Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa on the way to U.C. Tall, fit, energetic, and pretty darn cheerful for someone whoвЂ™s peered deep into the maw of the intelligence explosion, heвЂ™s got a bouncy step, a vigorous handshake, and a smile that shoots out rays of goodwill. This paragraphвЂ™s author is Steve Omohundro. These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal driven systems. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone elseвЂ™s safety. Surely no harm could come from building a chess playing robot, could it?вЂ¦ such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. READ MORE Inside вЂLabor DayвЂ™s Sexy Pie SceneДЇortunately, someone has laid the foundation for us: AI theorists return again and again to a handful of themes, none more urgent than this one: we need a science for understanding them. By about 2030, less than a generation from now, it could be our challenge to cohabit Earth with superintelligent machines, and to survive. You and I live at an interesting and sensitive time in human history. We are amoebas and we canвЂ™t figure out what the hell this thing is that weвЂ™re creating.вЂќ -Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines, Inc. WeвЂ™re at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. ThatвЂ™s whatвЂ™s so confusing-technologies are feeding back on themselves weвЂ™re taking off. WeвЂ™re now using programs to make much faster computers so the process can run much faster. Yet we donвЂ™t quite understand the process-itвЂ™s getting ahead of us. вЂњвЂ¦ we are beginning to depend on computers to help us evolve new computers that let us produce things of much greater complexity.

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