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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 AI 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 AI.
“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.”

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