Narrow AI
Superhuman at one thing, helpless at the next. It plays chess, folds proteins, translates a page. This is where we have lived for decades.
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Super intelligence
The last invention humanity may ever need to make.
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Chapter 01 — The shift
Artificial
Intelligence
AI learns what we already know.
SI would discover what we never could.
Chapter 02 — Three rungs
General AI
Human-level across the board. One system that can learn any intellectual task a person can, and move between them without being rebuilt.
Superintelligence
An intellect that greatly exceeds the best human minds in virtually every domain: science, strategy, invention, persuasion. Not a smarter tool. A new kind of mind.
Chapter 03 — Seventy years
Slowly,
then all at once.
The question
Alan Turing asks, “Can machines think?” and proposes the imitation game.
A name
The Dartmouth workshop coins the term “artificial intelligence.”
The explosion
I. J. Good describes machines that design better machines: an “intelligence explosion.”
Checkmate
IBM’s Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Deep learning
AlexNet crushes the ImageNet benchmark. Neural networks are back.
Move 37
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol at Go with a move no human would play.
Attention
The Transformer architecture is published. Every modern language model descends from it.
Biology
AlphaFold 2 predicts protein structures at near-experimental accuracy.
Everyone
Chatbots reach hundreds of millions of people. AI becomes something you talk to.
Beyond
The first system smarter than all of us, together. Nobody knows the date.
Chapter 04 — Recursion
Intelligence begins as scattered data.
It learns patterns. AI.
It learns to learn. AGI.
It improves itself. SI.
And then it keeps going.
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“The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
I. J. Good, 1965
Two futures.
One transition.
The promise
- 01Cures designed in days, not decades.
- 02Science at the speed of thought.
- 03Abundant, clean energy.
- 04A patient tutor for every child on Earth.
The peril
- 01Goals that quietly drift from ours.
- 02Power concentrated in very few hands.
- 03Minds no one can inspect.
- 04Mistakes we cannot take back.
Chapter 07 — The real work
Building it is hard.Aligning it is harder.
01
Aligned
It pursues what we would want on reflection, not just what we literally said.
02
Interpretable
We can look inside and understand why it decides what it decides.
03
Shared
Its benefits reach everyone, not only the people who built it.