Super AI: The Genie in the Bottle
By Ross Turner
Daily Life
“Artificial intelligence” is hard to get away from these days. Not merely its mention in tech circles and popular media, but its increasing application in daily life. From Alexa to self-driving cars, from Google Maps to the US military’s drone programs, artificial intelligence is integrating itself into the vital functions of our social, economic, and political lives. And it’s not slowing down. On the contrary, it is growing at a clip that has many AI researchers and scientists both excited and alarmed. Humanity now stands on a road that inevitably leads to artificial general intelligence (AGI), but one laden with pitfalls that demand caution. In order to understand why this is so and what worries pioneers in the field, we must first examine what artificial intelligence is, how it works, and what it can potentially do.
What is AI?
Computers, cell phones, calculators are weak AG
Artificial intelligence (AI) is simply any type of non-biological intelligence; that is, intelligent outcomes produced by machines. By far the most common and familiar type of AI is narrow AI, (also weak AI), which is used to perform a specific function or functions. It may possess superhuman abilities in limited areas, but it has no capacity to apply that intelligence broadly to other domains outside of its expertise. Its intelligence is not generalized.
Narrow and Safe
This can be anything as simple as a calculator, to most of the apps on your smart phone, to commercial and municipal applications such as traffic lights, aviation navigation systems, medical diagnostics, and high-frequency stock trading. Narrow AI is exactly as safe as the outcome it is designed to produce; it will never go beyond its limitations and develop its own goals and instruments for achieving them. While this makes it incredibly safe, it also severely limits what it is able to do and thus constrains the full benefits — and risks — of machine intelligence.
Strong AI
As with every human technology, AI brings both benefits & dangers
With AGI (also strong AI), this is not the case. An AGI is one able to perform across the full spectrum of human cognitive abilities, or better. This includes the ability to reason, plan, infer, communicate, learn from experience, think abstractly, solve problems, evaluate with limited information, and to use these in service of its goals. Though vastly different in architecture and “lived” experience from a human being, an AGI ought to be intellectually indistinguishable. Researchers have realized over the decades the difficulty in this given the extreme complexity of the human brain, but new developments such as deep reinforcement learning indicate significant progress in achieving a true AGI1.
