Alleged Abilities Of A SuperIntelligence
One of the major differences between an sl4-literate person and "normal" people is their different beliefs about what a real SuperIntelligence would and would not be able to do. This page lists some of the abilities a SuperIntelligence is most likely to have. The entries on this page are listed approximately in increasing order of their uncertainty. Everything on this page is open to debate or further explanation. (the entries within each group are currently unsorted)
Abilities a SuperIntelligence is guaranteed to have:
- creating Nanotech (Drex Tech, Zetta Tech)
- outsmarting humans
- preventing and reversing human aging (by using Nanotech)
- reviving cryogenically frozen people
- uploading humans
- creating computronium (how much EffectiveComputing Power?)
Abilities a SuperIntelligence is generally assumed to have, even though these abilities are not entirely guaranteed:
- preventing anyone from being injured in the riots that happen when people first encounter or hear about the SuperIntelligence (how?)
- disarming nuclear bombs, stopping bullets, preventing other physical violence
- preventing all Existential Risks
- SomethingTotallyUnexpected
- predicting humans (is full quantum simulation possible? is it necessary? is it desirable?)
- understanding fundamentally different minds
- figuring out what people "really want"
- preventing eventual planetary destruction due to asteroids and other dangerous space-things
- controlling or preventing future SuperIntelligences
- making itself smarter (what about the LimitsToIntelligence?)
- creating Femtotech
- becoming a SysOp
Abilities that we have no way of knowing whether or not a Superintelligence will have:
- understanding qualia
- perceiving qualia
- understanding the FirstCause
- discovering ObjectiveMorality
- achieving "InfiniteComputation"
- NormalizingHumanMorality
- creating something smaller than Femtotech
- creating OntoTech
--observer
The following is copied from "The Future of Intelligence" (or "Why Politics Is Largely Irrelevant") by RobinLeePowell:
So, a Friendly AI is now ruling the world. Now what?
A Friendly AI will probably do anything any human asks it do that doesn't conflict with the needs and rights of other humans. Please don't go thinking up Solomonic conundrums of conflicts of needs that the AI might be presented with. I can't answer what it will do because it's smarter than me. More importantly, it is kinder than me, more altruistic than me, and much, much, much less prone to bias than me. I would never want this kind of power put in any human's hands, myself included.
Anyway, here's a selection of things an AI with nanotech would be capable of doing, assuming it is sufficiently smart:
- End world hunger. No, seriously. Think back to that "food plants growing on bare rock" discussion. Our worldwide food problems now are about distribution; if anyone can walk out of their house and find enough food to subsist on (because the AI makes sure it's there), there is no distribution problem.
- Better still, ey could probably just reconfigure you to make your energy from water, sunlight, and occasionally eating some dirt if nothing else was available. That's not a joke. We know it can be done because plants do it, and there's nothing stopping a nanotech enabled intelligence from reconfiguring humans that way, if it's smart enough to figure out how.
- For that matter, there's nothing stopping the AI from creating you a four-course banquet, from scratch, at your request. All it really needs is a supply of organic molecules; garbage will do nicely.
- The AI, if it's smart enough, will be able to increase your intelligence.
- Better still, from my perspective, it will be able to upload you into a 'robotic' body, making you effectively immortal, since you can always take backups of your (vastly enhanced) brain. "Robotic" is in quotes, because there's no reason the body would have to be anything like a robot. It could even be identical to your original body, except the brain. It might even be possible to back your intelligence up without you ever leaving your body, and to have a new body made if you happen to die, but why you would want to avoid the advantages of having a much more powerful brain, I don't know.
- Please don't ask me how the AI will solve the overpopulation problem if everyone is immortal; I don't know, it's smarter than me.
- The AI can provide you with social interactions of arbitrary quality. This solves both pornography and loneliness at the same time. Imagine having the option of talking to someone who really understands what you're talking about, and who really cares, any time you want.
- World peace. Making guns not work is just the start. If the nanotech is sufficiently pervasive, you could be standing behind someone with a knife and everything would be fine, but your muscles would lock up when the knife was about to break skin. Or the knife would melt. Or something else entirely.
- None of which would stop people from doing anything they wanted to themselves or other consenting adults, unless the AI develops some weird morality complex, in which case I want nothing to do with that future.
- In other words, no human would ever have to endure involuntary pain, unhappiness, or stupidity ever again. Well, OK, 'unhappiness' is a bit of a stretch; I know people who are capable of being unhappy no matter what is happening in their lives. But then, they could ask the AI to fix that too, and if they don't, that makes it voluntary, doesn't it?
See also:
- Ultratechnologies (was: The inevitable limitations...) Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (Thu Nov 23 2000 - 14:04:35 MST)
Idea Page, Shallow Page
