The task is, fortunately, not the following: given a machine that possesses a high degree of intelligence, work out how to control it. If that were the task, we would be toast. A machine viewed as a black box, a fait accompli, might as well have arrived from outer space. And our chances of controlling a superintelligent entity from outer space are roughly zero. Similar arguments apply to methods of creating AI systems that guarantee we won’t understand how they work; these methods include whole-brain emulation — creating souped-up electronic copies of human brains — as well as methods based on simulated evolution of programs. I won’t say more about these proposals because they are so obviously a bad idea.