How To Build Skynet (Self-Aware Artificial Intelligence)

by phil on Saturday Apr 24, 2004 11:53 PM
Singularity, artificial intelligence

A prototypical blueprint for "Seed AI." A Seed AI is an artifically intelligent program that passes a threshold of intelligence required to improve its intelligence. Once the program is able to significantly improve itself, the sky's the limit.

Humans were "designed" by a process without design or foresight. Humans constitute only a tiny point in the space of possible minds. The study of AI is ultimately the study of minds in general, and there are several classes of advantage that a mind-in-general can have which human minds do not. Some of these advantages have already been touched on - the ability to add new sensory modalities, or the ability to carry out "boring" abstract processes using fast low-level computing elements rather than slow high-level deliberate intelligence. Other classes of advantage exist as well - for example: blending conscious and low-level thought; fine-grained self-observation; adding hardware to cognitive processes; deliberate learning; and more.

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If you need to place a hard upper bound on the possible speed of a seed AI, the only answer is that there isn't one. If there's something you need to do before the rise of superintelligence, you need to do it before the first successful seed AI. The time period separating the two could be arbitrarily short. Not just "short" relative to the speed of human cultural improvement, or "instantaneous" relative to the speed of human evolution - it may even be "short" relative to the timescale of human thinking. There's that ten-million-to-one disparity in (current) hardware clock speeds. (Read the Full Article)