From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I remain a technical optimist… the problem is not artificial intelligence, it's natural stupidity.
What we envision is humans using informal reasoning and intuition as a powerful guide, with formal systems then verifying those ideas. In this way, the formal system grounds high-level intuition.
Arguably, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.
AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries.
Among future technologies that may pose significant existential risks I would rank machine super intelligence at or near the top.
Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.
We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.
We're heading to a world where we can eliminate disease, increase our intelligence, and access all the food, healthcare, energy and education we could desire.
Think about a rabbit sitting in a field. If that rabbit saw a hawk circling above and decided to wait for the back-propagation step before responding, it would be dead. The better you model the world, and the faster you can act on that model, the more likely your genes are to survive.
The third and deepest reason this matters—why it's not just commercially meaningful but potentially world-changing—is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction.
AI doesn't just amplify our physical capabilities; it augments our intellect, allowing us to comprehend and engage with the world on a level previously unimagined. This, I believe, is the pinnacle of our evolutionary journey.
After each strike the drone would be updated with information about the actual destruction caused. If it did more damage than expected, then it could use this information to restrict its choice of weapon in future engagements.