The Inevitable

Stand-alone synthetic minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped, a penalty one might pay in order to have AI mobility in distant places.

read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of ebooks and etexts, every bit informs another; ever

In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs.

Now called freestyle chess matches, these are like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want. You can play as your unassisted human self, or you can act as the hand for your supersmart chess computer, merely moving its board pieces, or you can play as a “centaur,” which is the human/AI cyborg that Kasparov ad

Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself.

2006, Geoff Hinton, then at the University of Toronto, made a key tweak to this method, which he dubbed “deep learning.”

Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time. If we message someone, we expect them to reply instantly. If we spend money, we expect the balance in our account to adjust in real time. Why should medical diagnostics take days to return results instead of immediately? If we take a quiz in class, why shouldn’t the score be instant? F

When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it. We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, but it will be faceless, unseen. We will be able to reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic int

It’s hard to believe now, but until 1991 commercial enterprise on the internet was strictly prohibited as an unacceptable use. There was no selling, no ads. In the eyes of the National Science Foundation (which ran the internet backbone),

a result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.