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As part of the second White Paper produced by the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative I am discussing the evolution towards Artificial Super Intelligence. We will be discussing this at the Workshop in San Diego on October 30th and at the TTM 2018 following the workshop. Don’t miss it!
Today Artificial Intelligence is not au pair with human intelligence, humans still have the upper hand. However, this is not generally true. There are areas where computer intelligence is better than the human one, as an example where it is needed to look at huge amount of data, or remember many data, or evaluate the outcome of some complex decisions. Computer AI has managed to beat the human chess world champion, the human Go world champion, has won Jeopardy…
Hence it would be fair to say that although we do not have computers that can demonstrate the same level of human intelligence in general (Artificial General Intelligence –AGI) we have specific areas where computer intelligence is better than the human’s one.
Now, there is a consensus on the fact that sometime in the future computers will demonstrate an intelligence comparable to the one of humans, they will achieve AGI (although there is no consensus on “when” this will happen).
Paradoxically, this will be the point when they will also achieve ASI Artificial Super Intelligence since they will maintain the edge in those areas where they already have an edge on human intelligence, hence by the time they will demonstrate AGI they will also demonstrate ASI.
However, with ASI it is usually meant the capability to be better not just in a few areas but better in most areas. This might require a bit longer but not that much longer. The point is that computer are getting more intelligent by learning and they no longer learn from humans. They are starting to learn also by themselves, trying different approaches and evaluating them.
The advent of symbiotic autonomous systems -SAS-, where there will be a computer as a component, will lead to the emergence of intelligence at SAS level and this emergent intelligence is most likely to be better than the intelligence of each component. If one of the component is a human being and the other components are also intelligent, the emerging intelligence is likely to be of ASI type.
This will be unlikely to happen within the next 20 years, although a few scientists and futurists bet on this transition to ASI to happen in the fourth decade of this century.
