| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016340)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016340" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 1864 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| While Danny Hillis was an undergraduate at MIT, he built a computer out of Tinkertoys. |
| It has around 10, 000 wooden parts, plays tic-tac-toe, and never loses; it's now in the |
| Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. |
| As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence |
| Laboratory in the early 1980s, Danny designed a massively parallel computer with |
| 64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine and founded what may have |
| been the first Al company- Thinking Machines Corporation to produce and market it. |
| This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist |
| remarked, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." Maybe "despite" is the |
| wrong word, since Feynman had a well-known predilection for playing with dopey ideas. |
| In the event, he showed up on the day the company was incorporated and stayed on, for |
| summer jobs and special assignments, to make invaluable contributions to its work. |
| Danny has since established a number of technology companies, of which the |
| latest is Applied Invention, which partners with commercial enterprises to develop |
| technological solutions to their most intractable problems. He holds hundreds of U.S. |
| patents, covering parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays, forgery prevention |
| methods, and a slew of electronic and mechanical devices. His imagination is apparently |
| boundless, and here he sketches some possible scenarios that will result from our pursuit |
| of a better and better Al. |
| "Our thinking machines are more than metaphors," he says. "The question is not, |
| 'Will they be powerful enough to hurt us?' (they will), or whether they will always act in |
| our best interests (they won't), but whether over the long term they can help us find our |
| way where we come out on the Panacea/Apocalypse continuum." |
| 120 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016340 |
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