The Futurist Blog: Types of Superintelligence

Image source: Pixabay

Superintelligence is the level of intelligence that is beyond the realm of individual human level intelligence even the collective intelligence of the humankind. For example, a Superintelligent being or beings can build a spacecraft in days that will take humanity to learn the similar technologies for decades even millennia. It is a hot topic in sifi genre and dreams of Scientists and Futurists to build one someday. Some futurists argue that when Superintelligence will arrive, we will reach the event horizon of Singularity. At the event of Singularity, path of humanity will be unpredictable, abrupt and explosive. In the movie Transcendence (2014), Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is an AI researcher who becomes a Superintelligent being when his brain is uploaded a supercomputer before he dies. This event proceeds with a spiral of drastic events that can be considered singularity, though in pessimistic way.

Image source: Wikipedia

One of the first man-made superintelligence machine was envisioned by the Mathematician Alan Turing. The famous Turing test is used to distinguish between AI and human. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that if Moore's law continues (i.e. transistors count doubles every year in a processor chip), then we can reach singularity by 2029. However, we can reach singularity or Superintelligence by other means such as upgrading human genome by CRISPR to produce Superintelligent humans.

However, types of Superintelligence can be categorized by different ways such as individualistic or collective Superintelligence, biological versus non-biological and hybrid, qualitative (e.g. very fast in actions) or quantative (e.g. large number of high intelligent agents with slow actions) etc.

Let us talk about individualistic or collective Superintelligence today.

Image source: Pixabay

Individualistic Superintelligence:

Let us assume, a complex AI software (i.e. a collection of algorithms) running on a supercomputer suddenly becomes superintelligent and through the Internet able to control large number of computers and IoTs all over the world. Another, example is that we upgrade human genome to make intelligent humans. After couple of generations, a highly intelligent individual augment himself with cybernetics to become superintelligent.

Collective Superintelligence:

A group of highly intelligent machines or individuals who are good at different intelligent tasks collaborate to build a system that suddenly behaves as a superintelligent being. For example, Internet is a system that is built upon billions of computers and IoTs. The Internet may have some rudimentary level of intelligence, for example, Scientists has measured the intelligence of Google Assistance and found it better than a 6 year old human.

In the next couple of parts, I will discuss other types of superintelligence.

Thanks for reading and happy steeming!
crypto-futurist
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