If A Machine Ever Builds A Smarter Machine… STOP INVENTING

In 1965 the British mathematician Jack Good, who signed his papers I. J. Good, wrote one of the most quoted lines about AI: the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. Good had broken German codes at Bletchley Park alongside Alan Turing, and later helped Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey. We climb one level at a time. Why a hammer never designs a better hammer. Good's argument: a machine better than us at every kind of thinking would also be better at designing machines, so it could build a slightly smarter one, which builds a smarter one again: an "intelligence explosion". Is any of it happening? AlphaFold and the 2024 Nobel Prize, AlphaEvolve finding a way to multiply 4x4 grids with 48 multiplications instead of 49, and a 1% speedup in training the AI it runs on. Nobody knows if this goes all the way. Then the part people cut off: "provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control", and the word Good later wanted to change. Finally, the quiet version that is about you: London taxi drivers, The Knowledge, GPS, and why skills you hand over can fade. This is an idea and an argument, not a prediction. Sources I. J. Good (1965), "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine", Advances in Computers vol. 6 (quote and opening line): https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01... Good at Bletchley Park, friend of Turing, adviser on 2001: https://cser.ac.uk/news/humanitys-las... Good's late-1990s note about himself ("survival" replaced by "extinction"): https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/20... 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold, about 200 million predicted protein structures: https://www.maginative.com/article/go... Google DeepMind (May 14, 2025), AlphaEvolve: 4x4 complex matrices with 48 multiplications (Strassen's 1969 method needs 49), about 1% less Gemini training time: https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevo... The Knowledge (about 25,000 streets within six miles of Charing Cross): https://kottke.org/14/11/the-knowledg... Maguire, E. A. et al. (2000), "Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers", PNAS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... Dahmani, L. & Bohbot, V. D. (2020), "Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation", Scientific Reports: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... The machine chain, skill bars, curves, maze, street map, GPS-group bars and convoy map are our teaching drawings, not real data. The chat messages are made-up examples. Painted scenes are illustrations; no real person is painted. Photos (Wikimedia Commons) Bletchley Park Mansion: DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0 Alan Turing, 1951: Elliott & Fry, public domain Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove trailer, 1964): public domain HAL 9000 prop at an exhibition: Photojunkie, public domain Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, 2024 Nobel Prize laureates: Arthur Petron, CC BY-SA 4.0 AlphaFold prediction of ZNF555: AlphaFold DB, CC BY 4.0 Volker Strassen, 1970: Konrad Jacobs, CC BY-SA 2.0 de London black cab: Diliff, CC BY 2.5 Hippocampus MRI: Michael Firbank, public domain Logos: Google DeepMind and Gemini, used to name the companies and products discussed. Chapters 0:00 1965: a machine that doesn't exist 0:10 Bletchley Park, Turing and HAL 0:32 "The last invention that man need ever make" 0:43 What the last invention would mean 1:12 Level 1: what's special about inventing 1:48 Level 2: Good's intelligence explosion 2:14 The tutor chain 2:31 Level 3: AlphaFold and the Nobel Prize 3:03 AlphaEvolve: 48 instead of 49 3:33 An AI that speeds up building AI 3:56 Nobody knows 4:06 Level 4: the rest of Good's sentence 4:30 Who checks a smarter machine? 4:55 "Survival" becomes "extinction" 5:16 Level 5: the quieter way 5:31 London taxi drivers and The Knowledge 5:57 GPS and your sense of direction 6:26 Inventing is a skill too 6:43 Ten minutes first