Superintelligence

Superintelligence asks what will happen once we manage to build computers that are smarter than us, including what we need to do, how it’s going to work, and why it has to be done the exact right way to make sure the human race doesn’t go extinct.

After Alan Turing’s “Turing Machine” was invented as the first device to systematically follow and execute instructions in an automated way (watch The Imitation Game for more details, superb movie), the first real “digital” computer was completed in 1946.

Ever since that moment, computer scientists have been wondering how we can get these machines to actually think like us. The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was one of the first proper workshops in this area in 1956, and even though the next few years showed some results, like machines solving math problems or writing music, AI soon hit its limit – the hardware simply didn’t suffice to process all the necessary information for really complex tasks.

It took until the 80s for hardware to slowly catch up, but then the development of expert systems gave rise to the first, proper AI, which, for example, could diagnose cars like a mechanic would. Soon information was the limiting factor again, because with enough hardware to store, but not enough information to access, even the best expert systems could still not beat humans (it took Deep Blue over ten years of development to beat world champion Garry Kasparov, for example).

Since the 90s we’ve gotten smarter in how we build AI though, now modeling a lot more after neural systems in the brain and human genetics – by now AI has made its way pretty far into our daily lives, with smartphones and Google, for example.

What we’re still missing though, is an AI that can, for example, beat not just the best guy in chess, but also the best person in Jeopardy and Scrabble – we usually custom-build AI for a specific purpose.

Bostrom and other experts expect computers to be as smart as humans by 2075. Give it another 30 years until 2105 and we’ll have true superintelligence.

What we’re currently doing with AI is mostly teaching computers to imitate human thinking. Computers use logic to navigate a wealth of information, calculate probabilities and then take shortcuts humans can’t come up with to imitate their behavior – just faster. As described above, this requires access to a lot of information in real time and that’s a problem. An alternative would be to get computers to simulate the human brain, not just imitate it. This is called WBE – whole brain emulation – and would result in a computer that’s like a child:…