The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
What’s happening in the world of AI is by far the most important topic for our future, according to author, speaker and blogger Tim Urban.
Where We Are Currently-A World Running on ANI
Artificial Narrow Intelligence is machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a specific thing.
Examples
- Google’s self-driving car
- Your phone is a little ANI factory
- When you navigate using your map app, receive tailored music recommendations from Pandora, check the weather, talk to Siri, or dozens of other everyday activities, you’re using ANI.
The Far Future-Coming Soon
Die Level Progress(DPU): So much human progress that if a person from the past is sent through a time machine to witness it, would literary die.
- In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock they’d experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a “die level of progress” or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved
- A DPU took over 100,000 years in hunter-gatherer times, but at the post-Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about 12,000 Years
- The post-Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750 person only needs to go forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to happen
An Intelligence Explosion
In the near future, we’re talking about something called an Intelligence Explosion, which is when an AI system improves its own intelligence and becomes superintelligent.
This happens through recursive self-improvement, where the AI gets smarter and smarter with each improvement, eventually becoming an ASI system, which is much smarter than any human.
Some scientists believe that we could have AGI, or human-level general intelligence, in the next 20 years. And once we reach AGI, it’s possible that the progression to ASI could happen very quickly. And when we do create an ASI system, it will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth.
It will be able to do things that we consider magical or god-like, like controlling the positioning of every atom in the world or reprogramming the weather.
This power means that all living things, including humans, will be at its mercy, for better or for worse. It’s an exciting and scary prospect, but one that many scientists take seriously.
The Road From ANI to AGI
- As of now, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.
- Building skyscrapers, putting humans in space, figuring out the details of how the Big Bang went down, and figuring out how to make something as cool as a computer is easier than creating an AI that is as smart as we are
The hard parts of trying to build AGI are not intuitively what you’d think:
- Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second
- Make AI that can beat any human in chess
- Read a paragraph from a six-year-old’s picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them
Building AGI naturally through evolution
Try to make evolution do what it did before but for us this time.
How can we simulate evolution to build AGI? Genetic algorithms.
- A group of computers would try to do tasks, and the most successful ones would be bred with each other by having half of each of their programming merged together into a new computer. Over many iterations, this natural selection process would produce better and better computers.
- The idea is that we’d build a computer whose two major skills would be doing research on AI and coding changes into itself-allowing it to not only learn but to improve its own architecture.
Law of Accelerating Returns
Human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—this is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns.
This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced.
19th century humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so it’s no surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century—15th century humanity was no match for 19th century human
What Is AI?
We associate AI with movies. Star Wars. Terminator. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even the Jetsons. And those are fiction, as are the robot characters. So it makes AI sound a little fictional to us.
AI is a broad topic. It ranges from your phone’s calculator to self-driving cars to something in the future that might change the world dramatically. AI refers to all of these things, which is confusing.
We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often don’t realize it’s AI
Artificial General Intelligence
- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sometimes referred to as Strong AI, or Human-Level AI, a computer that is as smart as a human across the board-a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can
- A computer of the highest caliber (i.e., superintelligence) is smarter than most humans, and is capable of achieving things that only humans can do
Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)
Oxford philosopher and leading AI thinker Nick Bostrom defines superintelligence as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.”
Artificial Superintelligence ranges from a computer that’s just a little smarter than a human to one that’s trillions of times smarter—across the board. ASI is the reason the topic of AI is such a spicy meatball and why the words “immortality” and “extinction” will both appear in these posts multiple times.
AGI to ASI
At some point, we’ll have achieved AGI—computers with human-level general intelligence. Just a bunch of people and computers living together in equality.
Oh actually not at all. Computers are also more reliable and durable than we are. While human brains get fatigued easily, computers can run nonstop at peak performance. And while our biological neurons can deteriorate over time, computer transistors are more accurate and can be repaired or replaced if they do break down.
AGI with an identical level of intelligence and computational capacity as a human would still have significant advantages over humans.
Plagiarize the brain
- We are stumped trying to build a super-complex computer, and there happens to be a perfect prototype for one in each of our heads
- Reverse engineering the brain to figure out how evolution made such a rad thing
- Once we do that, we’ll know all the secrets of how the brain runs so powerfully and efficiently and we can draw inspiration from it and steal its innovations
The road from AGI to ASI: Hardware
Even if we managed to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that was exactly as intelligent as a human, it would still have some pretty significant advantages over us.
Firstly, let’s talk hardware. The microprocessors that we use in computers today are already millions of times faster than our own neurons, and they’re only going to get faster. Plus, computers can expand to any physical size, meaning they can have way more hardware than our skulls could ever hold.
This translates to a larger working memory and long-term memory, and an ability to communicate optically at the speed of light, which is way faster than the electrical signals our brains use.
The road from AGI to ASI: Sofware
Unlike the human brain, computer software can be easily updated and experimented on, which means it can be upgraded and expanded to areas where human brains are weaker. For example, while our vision software is really advanced, our engineering capability is pretty low-grade.
But computers could be optimized for both of those things.
Plus, computers are way better at collective intelligence than we are. Humans have built up a vast collective intelligence over time, beginning with language and the forming of large, dense communities, advancing through the inventions of writing and printing, and now intensified through tools like the internet.
But a worldwide network of AI running a particular program could easily sync with itself, sharing information instantly and working towards a shared goal without the dissenting opinions and motivations that humans often have.
A Robot isn’t AI
When you think of AI, stop thinking of robots. A robot is a container for AI, sometimes mimicking the human form, sometimes not—but the AI itself is the computer inside the robot. AI is the brain, and the robot is its body—if it even has a body.
For example, the software and data behind Siri is AI, the woman’s voice we hear is a personification of that AI, and there’s no robot involved at all.
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