mashable | Humans are currently the most intelligent beings on the planet — the
result of a long history of evolutionary pressure and adaptation. But
could we some day design and build machines that surpass the human
intellect?
This is the concept of superintelligence, a growing area of research
that aims to improve understanding of what such machines might be like,
how they might come to exist, and what they would mean for humanity's
future.
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's recent book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
discusses a variety of technological paths that could reach
superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI), from mathematical
approaches to the digital emulation of human brain tissue.
And although it sounds like science fiction, a group of experts, including Stephen Hawking, wrote an article on the topic
noting that "There is no physical law precluding particles from being
organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the
arrangements of particles in human brains."
Brain as computer
The idea that the brain performs "computation" is widespread in
cognitive science and AI since the brain deals in information,
converting a pattern of input nerve signals to output nerve signals.
Another well-accepted theory is that physics is Turing-computable:
That whatever goes on in a particular volume of space, including the
space occupied by human brains could be simulated by a Turing machine, a
kind of idealized information processor. Physical computers perform
these same information-processing tasks, though they aren't yet at the
level of Turing's hypothetical device.
These two ideas come together to give us the conclusion that
intelligence itself is the result of physical computation. And, as
Hawking and colleagues go on to argue, there is no reason to believe
that the brain is the most intelligent possible computer.
In fact, the brain is limited by many factors, from its physical
composition to its evolutionary past. Brains were not selected
exclusively to be smart, but to generally maximize human reproductive
fitness. Brains are not only tuned to the tasks of the hunter gatherer,
but also designed to fit through the human birth canal; supercomputing
clusters or data-centers have no such constraints.
Synthetic hardware has a number of advantages over the human brain
both in speed and scale, but the software is what creates the
intelligence. How could we possibly get smarter-than-human software?
