The fact is that in admiring the productivity of genius our admiration has been misplaced. Nothing is easier than the generation of new ideas: with some suitable interpretation, a kaleidoscope, the entrails of a sheep, or a noisy vacuum tube will generate them in profusion. What is remarkable in the genius is the discrimination with which the possibilities are winnowed.
A possible method, then, is to use some random source for the generation of all the possibilities and to pass its output through some device that will select the answer. But before we proceed to make the device we must dispose of the critic who puts forward this well known argument: as the device will be made by some designer, it can select only what he has made it to select, so it can do no more than he can.…When the whole process of selection is thus broken into two stages the details need only a little care for there to occur an amplification in the degree of selection exerted. The designer, therefore, should use his (small) selectivity to bring into action that which is going to do the main selecting.
Thus, suppose we are tackling a difficult social and economic problem; we first select what we want, which might be:
An organization that will be stable at the conditions:
Unemployed < 100,000 persons
Crimes of violence < 10 per week
Minimal income per family > £500 per annum
This is our selection, and its degree depends on what other conditions we might have named but did not. The solving-machine now has to make its selection, finding this organization among the multitudinous other possibilities in the society. We and the solving-machine are selecting the same entity, but we are selecting it from quite different sets, or contexts, and the degrees of selection exerted can vary with some independence.
The building of a true selection-amplifier—one that selects over a greater range than that covered when it was designed—is thus possible. We can now proceed to build the system whose selectivity, and therefore whose intelligence, exceeds that of its designer.
