9) Have you ever built anything you considered really "intelligent"?

Hugo de Garis: No. I'm living one generation too soon for that. My kids may see the first artificially intelligent creatures towards the end of their lives.

Richard Wheeler: I think all human artefacts (many non-human as well) are "intelligent" in their own way; that is, they exist only in light of "intelligent" creation and perspective. However, although I have built things that are surprising, useful, and thought provoking, I would never call any of them "intelligent" - perhaps because they were all mostly designed in the knowledge management tradition of deterministic encoding and representation. They have, broadly, lacked that spark of emergent alchemy, which we seem to perceive as intelligence.

10) Do you think human evolution is at an end, or will humans continue to evolve?

Hugo de Garis: Human evolution in the sense of ultra-slow Darwinian molecular evolution of our DNA is more or less at a standstill, because in our modern culture even the "unfit" survive. Modern technology and high living standards keep the "weaker" members of our population alive who would have died in harsher times. Social evolution however is another matter and is increasing at an exponential rate, with total human knowledge doubling every decade or so. I believe that humanity is now at the point of creating a new form of evolution, i.e. artilectual evolution, which will occur at electronic speeds inside artilects of massive proportions. I suspect that this transition from biological to artilectual evolution is inherent in nature and has probably already occurred zillions of times in the universe. Our solar system is a billion years younger than others are, so there have probably been artilects around for aeons. The universe is therefore probably teeming with artilects at various levels of development, and utterly ignoring us. Artilects communicating with human beings would be like human beings communicating with rocks.

Richard Wheeler: Evolution, especially in human terms, is a very difficult topic. It is commonly heard that human evolution has shifted from the organic (better toolmakers) to the purely inorganic (better tools) - that technology is an evolutionary "extension" to humankind, and as such, has taken over from Darwin. The more technologically fit among us, it would seem, are prospering at an ever-increasing rate. While I would not argue with this concept, I see real challenges growing out of the fundamental unfitness of humankind to control the artefacts it is beginning to create; surely the day will come when technology takes over as the dominant form of life on the planet - it has been widely proposed that this may even be nature's plan as human life becomes increasingly untenable. I do not necessarily view this as a bad thing, and believe it may be reasonable to assume that the mechanisms nature uses to keep organisms in check, and from outgrowing or destroying their niche, may apply to humanity as well. However, I believe that the great promise of technology and A.I. is still as tools to advance and improve the human condition. A.I. is not unique in this perspective. We created the hammer because our hands are terrible at pounding in nails. No one was afraid of the hammer until someone sharpened one end. We created the calculator and modern computing devices for the same reasons - because our minds are terrible at manipulating numbers. Many people are looking to A.I. in a similar fashion - to create tools to monitor and manipulate systems, which we are unable to understand ourselves, and like all tools, A.I. is undoubtedly dangerous. The real problem is the power a hammer, calculator, or A.I. device gives its creator - as before: the tools are getting smarter, but we are not.