Making Sense of the AI Revolution

The advent of an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – i.e., an advanced form of AI that surpasses human capabilities in almost every cognitive field of endeavour – is perhaps the closest analogue to the public discovery of an advanced alien intelligence. It is also far more likely to occur over the course of our lifetimes, with many titans of industry and lead forecasting platforms now predicting its materialisation within the next five to ten years.

While the parallel with extraterrestrial intelligence may, at first glance, seem overly colourful, it is, in fact, far less otherworldly than one may at first believe. As a number of lead technologists, ethicists and philosophers have noted, a truly superintelligent form of artificial intelligence would constitute far more than a revolutionary general-purpose technology. In essence, it would signal the birth of a new species – and one vested with capabilities that, in the eyes of many, would seem almost godlike. After all, AI creators and entrepreneurs such as Sam Altman frequently talk in rapturous, quasi-mystical terms of the 'magic' of the technologies they are 'summoning', and certain cults have already emerged that openly worship superintelligent AI. The ramifications of such a paradigm-shifting development in human history will undoubtedly be profound. They are also infuriatingly hard to game out and predict.

Will the deepening enmeshment of AI into command-and-control structures upend nuclear deterrence, catapulting us into a new, dread-filled era of instability? Will ASI cure cancer, or reverse aging? Will its increasingly widespread use for everything from basic writing to geospatial orientation enhance our collective intelligence but individually transform us into slack-jawed dullards, as one recent, much-discussed MIT study appears to suggest? And last but not least, are we in the process of foolishly conjuring up a technology whose advances not only outpace our capacity for understanding, but also pose an existential threat to our very existence?