What progress has been made? One major advance in Artificial Intelligence (or AI) are man-made machines that mimic our own intelligence. Since the invention of computers in 1940, scientists have been working to build a machine that can think. Its intelligence could even be dangerous, since it would be too smart for us to disable in the event of an emergency. Such a machine would have a lot of power over our lives. But advancements in the field are happening quickly, so it could be upon us faster than we think. And when it comes to building a superintelligent machine that can learn and act without the guiding hand of a human, it may still be decades away. However, this is far from the kind of “general intelligence” humans possess, and which has been the goal of AI research for decades. Consider, for example, the automated spam filters that keep our inboxes free from annoying mass emails and save important messages. We have already been able to create machines that have the capacity to learn and reason using information that’s been plugged in by humans. But where does technology stand at present? And in our post-Industrial Revolution era it shrunk to a mere 90 minutes.Ī technological advancement like the advent of superintelligent machines would mean radical change for the world as we know it. This number dropped to two centuries during the Agricultural Revolution in 5,000 BC. For instance, did you know that the pace of major revolutions in technology has been increasing over time? For example, improving at the snail’s pace of a few hundred thousand years ago, human technology would have needed one million years to become economically productive enough to sustain the lives of an additional million people. So what would the emergence of a new species, intellectually superior to humans, mean for the world?įirst we’ll need to review a bit of history.

In essence, our superior intelligence propelled us to the top. What fundamentally sets us apart from the beasts of the field? Well, the main difference between human beings and animals is our capacity for abstract thinking paired with the ability to communicate and accumulate information.

Superintelligence by nick bostrom