This is part of IEEE Spectrum's SPECIAL REPORT: THE SINGULARITY

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I am a machine. So are you.

Of all the hypotheses I've held during my 30-year career, this one in particular has been central to my research in robotics and artificial intelligence. I, you, our family, friends, and dogs--we all are machines. We are really sophisticated machines made up of billions and billions of biomolecules that interact according to well-defined, though not completely known, rules deriving from physics and chemistry. The biomolecular interactions taking place inside our heads give rise to our intellect, our feelings, our sense of self.

Accepting this hypothesis opens up a remarkable possibility. If we really are machines and if--this is a big if --we learn the rules governing our brains, then in principle there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to replicate those rules in, say, silicon and steel. I believe our creation would exhibit genuine human-level intelligence, emotions, and even consciousness.

I'm far from alone in my conviction that one day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence, often called an artificial general intelligence, or AGI. But how and when we will get there, and what will happen after we do, are now the subjects of fierce debate in my circles. Some researchers believe that AGIs will undergo a positive-feedback self-enhancement until their comprehension of the universe far surpasses our own. Our world, those individuals say, will change in unfathomable ways after such superhuman intelligence comes into existence, an event they refer to as the singularity.

Perhaps the best known of the people proselytizing for this singularity--let's call them singularitarians--are acolytes of Raymond Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005) and board member of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Palo Alto, Calif. Kurzweil and his colleagues believe that this super AGI will be created either through ever-faster advances in artificial intelligence or by more biological means--”direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, [and] ultrahigh-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation” are some of their ideas. They don't believe this is centuries away; they think it will happen sometime in the next two or three decades.

What will the world look like then? Some singularitarians believe our world will become a kind of techno-utopia, with humans downloading their consciousnesses into machines to live a disembodied, after-death life. Others, however, anticipate a kind of technodamnation in which intelligent machines will be in conflict with humans, maybe waging war against us. The proponents of the singularity are technologically astute and as a rule do not appeal to technologies that would violate the laws of physics. They well understand the rates of progress in various technologies and how and why those rates of progress are changing. Their arguments are plausible, but plausibility is by no means certainty.

My own view is that things will unfold very differently. I do not claim that any specific assumption or extrapolation of theirs is faulty. Rather, I argue that an artificial intelligence could evolve in a much different way. In particular, I don't think there is going to be one single sudden technological ”big bang” that springs an AGI into ”life.” Starting with the mildly intelligent systems we have today, machines will become gradually more intelligent, generation by generation. The singularity will be a period, not an event.

This period will encompass a time when we will invent, perfect, and deploy, in fits and starts, ever more capable systems, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself but by the usual economic and sociological forces. Eventually, we will create truly artificial intelligences, with cognition and consciousness recognizably similar to our own. I have no idea how, exactly, this creation will come about. I also don't know when it will happen, although I strongly suspect it won't happen before 2030, the year that some singularitarians predict.

But I expect the AGIs of the future--embodied, for example, as robots that will roam our homes and workplaces--to emerge gradually and symbiotically with our society. At the same time, we humans will transform ourselves. We will incorporate a wide range of advanced sensory devices and prosthetics to enhance our bodies. As our machines become more like us, we will become more like them.

And I'm an optimist. I believe we will all get along.

Like many AI researchers, I've always dreamed of building the ultimate intelligence. As a longtime fan of Star Trek , I have wanted to build Commander Data, a fully autonomous robot that we could work with as equals. Over the past 50 years, the field of artificial intelligence has made tremendous progress. Today you can find AI-based capabilities in things as varied as Internet search engines, voice-recognition software, adaptive fuel-injection modules, and stock-trading applications. But you can't engage in an interesting heart-to-power-source talk with any of them.

We have many very hard problems to solve before we can build anything that might qualify as an AGI. Many problems have become easier as computer power has reliably increased on its exponential and seemingly inexorable merry way. But we also need fundamental breakthroughs, which don't follow a schedule.

To appreciate the challenges ahead of us, first consider four basic capabilities that any true AGI would have to possess. I believe such capabilities are fundamental to our future work toward an AGI because they might have been the foundation for the emergence, through an evolutionary process, of higher levels of intelligence in human beings. I'll describe them in terms of what children can do.

The object-recognition capabilities of a 2-year-old child. A 2-year-old can observe a variety of objects of some type--different kinds of shoes, say--and successfully categorize them as shoes, even if he or she has never seen soccer cleats or suede oxfords. Today's best computer vision systems still make mistakes--both false positives and false negatives--that no child makes.

The language capabilities of a 4â¿¿year-old child. By age 4, children can engage in a dialogue using complete clauses and can handle irregularities, idiomatic expressions, a vast array of accents, noisy environments, incomplete utterances, and interjections, and they can even correct nonnative speakers, inferring what was really meant in an ungrammatical utterance and reformatting it. Most of these capabilities are still hard or impossible for computers.