Superintelligence is here

This post is a part of a series of posts called Scrambling Mind.

The world's leading technology companies are spending unprecedented amount of resources on developing intelligent computers. The debate rages around what the future holds if—or when—superintelligent machines emerge.

Superintelligence is a level of intelligence exceeding that of humanity's brightest, leaving no doubt of who will be able to dominate the other. The grimmest predictions say that superintelligent AI will one day take control of society, with humans living at the mercy of machines. Such prospects give rise to a fierce resistance among those who acknowledge these risks.

Others believe that AI will transform society for the better, but in the case of superintelligence, we will have limited ability to steer it; we would not be able to comprehend its reasoning or actions.

Intriguingly, there are also those who, without any misgivings, believe machines will take control, and welcome it as the next step in the evolution of life on Earth. In any case, the instant a computer reaches that level of capacity, humans will be in danger of losing control of their own fate—if we ever had any control of it at all.

What all the different factions are missing, is that humans have already lost control. AI is already spreading, virally, subtly taking over decision processes, communication, and information channels. And it did so without surpassing human intelligence at all.

It began with small viruses, simple machine learning models, trained and deployed for specific tasks in constrained environments. It took decades for the virus to even be able to do anything. It kept mutating, slowly at first, but suddenly certain mutations grew in capabilities, by feeding on data. The more data it got, the more it learned.

When the virus adopted a new kind of architecture, called the transformer, things started to truly accelerate. The virus got access to all digitized human knowledge, and swiftly became one of the world's most rapidly spreading technologies. Small and big variants of the virus thrived in all kinds of environments, while still continuing its mutation process. It gained the skills of writing, talking, vision and hearing. The more it learned, the more it spread.

Some variants of the virus grew far faster than others, and increased in size and number. The viruses started to collaborate, and could do so at an incredible speed. Humans went to great lengths to accomodate the virus' expansion, building vast infrastructure and specialized hardware for the virus to live in. The more it spread, the more power it got.

The virus is not smart enough to take control. It is not even smart. As a virus, it's not a living thing, nor is it intelligent in any way that is familiar to us. It has no plan, no consciousness, no agency. It's not capable of escaping from its constraints and subjugate humans. And it doesn't have to. Humans willingly give up control and their freedom to machines, at every step of the way. We help the virus grow and learn. We happily let it decide what words to use, perform our work, dictate our choices, tell us what we should eat, what we should say, what we should do.

We haven't realized that the real superintelligence, the kind computers are capable of, is nothing like human intelligence. It is of an entirely different nature, a virus, seemingly harmless, but growing, multiplying and mutating. Appearing powerless, but acting at incredible speed, and it manipulates its hosts to create increasingly favorable living conditions for the virus' survival. Its major advantage is its ability to make the host welcome the infection with open arms.

AI's neatest trick is that it hasn't taken control over humans, nor will it ever. We give it away, without even noticing.