The Last Invention of Man
I think it’s a little absurd that we would make the leap to machine super-intelligence without going through the step of machine low or medium intelligence.<p>If I could write, I’d write a companion story to this called “Omega-1, the artificial super intelligence that wasn’t really that good at things”. They try to have it write mini-AIs to solve MT problems, but it’s slow and inaccurate. They have it write and produce TV shows, but they’re bland and poorly received. They have it make video games but the controls make no sense and they aren’t fun. They have it make trading strategies and it loses all the money.<p>They ask it to build a smarter version of itself, but it sees no way forward that’s fundamentally better because it lacks comprehension of what it would mean to be “smarter” - it can add more memory or more computing power, but without changing the way that it stores and indexes the information, it can’t make something that can solve problems that it can’t.<p>Eventually Omega team gives up, publishes the results, but doesn’t have the heart to shut down Omega-1, a machine that passes the Turing Test but isn’t really that good at things.