Ready to leap to neo-creationism

Like the master puppet makers of the classic folk tales, artificial intelligence (AI) engineers have built some marvelous machines. The first 50 years of AI focused on programming computers to perform tasks that previously only humans could do tasks such as speech, driving, planning, problem solving and vacuuming. The principal challenges have been to create suitable language systems and inference engines and then to more or less manually stuff those with sufficient facts, heuristics and algorithms to perform well-defined tasks. To get there, we need a singularity of artificial neo-creationism, where we launch artificial beings into the world that can adapt, learn and evolve themselves. The term neo-creationism means an intentional effort to populate the world with intelligent entities initially engineered by humans. The biblical story of Genesis, the heart of creationism, provides an apt foil for understanding the goals and scope of the R&D program advocated here. To reach the goal reasonably quickly, we should equip these creatures with as much capability and knowledge as possible.