British computer scientist Alan Turing believed that scientists one day would be able to design a program that would teach itself. This led to his idea of a “child machine,” a “seed AI” that would create new versions of itself. Scientists speculate that such a process of “recursive self-improvement” could one day lead to an “intelligence explosion” resulting in “superintelligence,” a radically different kind of intelligence.

The Evolution Of AI: Self-Teaching AI

At best, the evolution of intelligent life places an upper bound on the intrinsic difficulty of designing intelligence.

Relentless doubt about the efficacy of AI always comes back to its motivation and how to refine it. The question remains: how can science create an AI with “final goals” which align with the values that foster peaceful coexistence between man and machine. Scientists might approach this process of “value loading” in several ways. One would be simply to write values into an AI’s program. That evokes the riddle of how to translate the incomprehensible, sometimes ambiguous, nature of truths and principles into code.

The Moral Character Of AI

AI could also grow by the path of genetic engineering, which could lead to a population of genetically enhanced individuals who together make up a “collective superintelligence.” This scenario might include cyborgs and systems like an “intelligent web.”

The Evolution Of AI: Genetic Engineering

Computer scientists have been wondering how we can get machines to actually think like us. Since the invention of computers, the hardware simply didn’t suffice to process all the necessary information for really complex tasks until the 80s.For the past two decades, we’ve gotten smarter in how we build AI though, now modelling 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.

The Evolution Of AI: The First Computers

Artificial intelligence can be far less human-like in its motivations than a green scaly alien.

As science’s exploration of superintelligence progresses, more questions arise. For instance, how might different efforts to create superintelligence compete with each other? An ancillary to that question is what the consequences might be if a front-running technology gained a “decisive strategic advantage.” An artificial intelligence project might achieve such an advantage by reinforcing its dominance in a way human organizations cannot.

The Road To Dominance

Three lessons about the state of artificial intelligence to show you it’s up to all of us to make our future a good one: <ul><li>AI used to be limited by hardware, but now it’s mostly a problem of data.</li><li>There are two different ways to design superintelligent computers.</li><li>Superintelligence must be the result of global collaboration, not some secret government program, or we’re screwed.</li></ul>

The State Of Artificial Intelligence(AI)

The oncoming and unstoppable intelligence explosion carries profound “existential risk.” As technology slowly evolves to make this explosion a reality, humans must carefully consider all the philosophical and moral ramifications now – prior to the appearance of superintelligent AI. Once AI appears, it may be too late for contemplation.

The Risk Of SuperIntelligence

AI may grow as an intelligent software based on the architecture of a particular human brain. This differs from AI and speculatively involves taking a dead person’s brain and creating a digital reproduction of that person’s “original intellect, with memory and personality intact.” This “barefaced plagiarism” is called “uploading,” or “whole brain emulation” (WBE). It would take years, perhaps until the middle of this century, to develop the necessary enabling technologies.

The Evolution Of AI: Replicating A Human Mind

Bear in mind that the character of AI and, by extension, of superintelligence, is not expressly human. Fantasies about humanized AI are misleading. Though perhaps counterintuitive, the thesis of orthogonality holds that levels of intelligence do not correlate with final goals. More intelligence doesn’t necessarily imply more shared or common goals among different AIs.

AI Is Always Compared To Humans

Within the panorama of possibilities for superintelligence, the most practical – and, perhaps, also the safest – the alternative may be whole brain emulation, not AI, although some scientists dispute that notion.Whichever path humanity chooses, a true intelligence explosion is probably decades away. Nevertheless, be aware that people react to AI like children who discover unexploded ordnance. In this instance, even experts don’t know what they’re looking at.

When Tomorrow Comes

In contemplating the specter of superintelligence gone berserk, some suggest reducing AI size, scope and capability. For example, scientists might base an early-term AI on nothing more than a question-and-answer system, an “oracle.” Programmers would have to take great care to clarify their original intentions so the AI functioned as desired.

AI Architecture

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.

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence.

NICK BOSTROM

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