OPPapers.com

Ai

Eric Fingerman



By a "superintelligence" we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the

best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity,

general wisdom and social skills. This definition leaves open how the

superintelligence is implemented: it could be a digital computer, an

ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue or what have

you. It also leaves open whether the superintelligence is conscious and has

subjective experiences.



Entities such as companies or the scientific community are not

superintelligences according to this definition. Although they can perform a

number of tasks of which no individual human is capable, they are not

intellects and there are many fields in which they perform much worse than

a human brain - for example, you can't have real-time conversation with

"the scientific community".



Superintelligence requires software as well as hardware. There are several

approaches to the software problem, varying in the amount of top-down

direction they require. At the one extreme we have systems like CYC which

is a very large encyclopedia-like knowledge-base and inference-engine. It

has been spoon-fed facts, rules of thumb and heuristics for over a decade by

a team of human knowledge enterers. While systems like CYC might be

good for certain practical tasks, this hardly seems like an approach that will

convince AI-skeptics that superintelligence might well happen in the

foreseeable future. We have to look at paradigms that require less human

input, ones that make more use of bottom-up methods.



Given sufficient hardware and the right sort of programming, we could

make the machines learn in the same way a child does, i.e. by interacting

with human adults and...