Superintelligence is already here, today

People argue back and forth about when artificial superintelligence will arrive. The truth is that it’s already here.

Go back a hundred years, and the popular notion of “intelligence” would probably include things like calculating speed and memorization. Then we invented computers, which could memorize and recall infinitely more things than we could, and do calculations infinitely faster. But we didn’t want to call those capabilities “intelligence”, because we recognized that although they were very powerful, they were very narrow. So we started to use the word “intelligence” to refer to the things machines still couldn’t do — various forms of pattern-matching, logical reasoning, communicating through natural language, and so on.

Even before the invention of AI, though, computers were already participating in frontier research. The four-color theorem is a famously hard math problem that stumped humans until the 1970s, when some mathematicians used a computer to prove it. The humans figured out that the theorem could be proven by brute force, just by checking a very large number of cases. So the computer did a mental task that humans couldn’t, and the result was a scientific breakthrough.

In the 2020s, we invented computer systems that could do most of the kinds of cognitive tasks that previously only humans could do. They can read, understand, and speak in human language. They can do mathematics, which is really just a language with very formal rules (this means they can also do theoretical physics). They can recognize complex patterns of knowledge embedded in written text, and apply those patterns to produce actionable insights. They can write software, because software is also just a language with formal rules. It turns out that all computers really needed in order to do all of this stuff was A) statistical regressions to identify patterns probabilistically, and B) a very large amount of computing power.

This doesn’t mean that AI can now do everything a human being can do. Its intelligence is “jagged” — there are still some things humans are better at. But this is also true of human beings’ advantages over animals. Did you know that chimps are better than humans at game theory and have better working memory? My rabbit can distinguish sounds much more sensitively than I can. If we were capable of creating business contracts with chimps and rabbits, we might even pay them for these services.