2 min readAI: When artificial superintelligence is just a couple of years away

This article offers a summary of the concepts discussed by Tim Urban in his 2015 article entitled The AI Revolution: The Road to AI Superintelligence.

If you are on this blog, then you probably have heard about artificial intelligence (AI). Perhaps you’ve know a little bit about Deepmind’s efforts to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI) [see Alpha Go Zero Shows How Close We Are To Generalization of Artificial Intelligence], and Elon Musk’s pronouncements about the danger of artificial superintelligence (ASI) [watch Elon Musk and Bill Gates answer a question on the risks of AI]. Or maybe you are confused how a simple AI on your mobile phone could lead to the extinction of humanity.

In 2015, Tim Urban wrote a 2-part article entitled The AI Revolution: The Road to Artificial Superintelligence. From its publication, the article has already garnered the attention of the AI community, because it was exhaustive and spot on in its discussion.

In 2017, it was republished by HuffPost to educate the public about AI development and our outlook for the future. Today, this article is the most popular among all of Tim Urban’s articles, and has become a cornerstone article educating the public about AI, AGI, and ASI.

We have decided not to summarize Urban’s article because it is easy to read, and the points he raised are too valuable to skim through. We think that everyone who is interested in seeing a future where humans still exist should read his work, and contemplate on the realities he discusses.

But to aid in your research, we put together a summary of the concepts Urban discussed in article 1 of this series.

Important Concepts in AI development

• Law of Accelerating Returns proposed by Raymond Kurzweil
• Artificial Narrow Intelligence
• Artificial General Intelligence
• Artificial Superintelligence
• Moore’s Law
• Whole Brain Emulation

[contentcards url=”https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html” target=”_blank”]