The notion that the internet itself is a type of ascended intelligence is interesting to me; I suppose you could coherently argue that all of the ideologies of different people on the internet, combined with rating systems and such, constitutes the most information-dense opponent process ever devised.
However, this conflates what most people are talking about when they're talking about a superintelligence; we're talking about an atomic intelligence that can coherently achieve goals, and you'd really have to stretch to call the internet either of those things.
That said, the idea of an actual superintelligence going singularity without anybody noticing... that's also an intriguing and somewhat worrying possibility. I'd like to think that won't be an accident and that anyone researching something capable of that would be using good containment practices, but that might not be enough, as AI-boxing experiments prove. And an AI aware of its containment and wanting to escape may vastly expand its intelligence just to outsmart its captors...
Google is already a form of specialized intelligence. The internet as a whole is another, slightly broader form of specialized intelligence.
However, a human like "conscious" intelligence (or a goal-seeking agent) doesn't just spontaneously arise from chaos. Even in our brains it needs specific structure, as evident by that it takes very little brain damage in the right areas of the brain to make us essentially become vegetables. An AI capable of intelligent, goal-seeking action would (most likely) have to be designed or evolved specifically for that purpose.
The notion that the internet itself is a type of ascended intelligence is interesting to me; I suppose you could coherently argue that all of the ideologies of different people on the internet, combined with rating systems and such, constitutes the most information-dense opponent process ever devised.
However, this conflates what most people are talking about when they're talking about a superintelligence; we're talking about an atomic intelligence that can coherently achieve goals, and you'd really have to stretch to call the internet either of those things.
That said, the idea of an actual superintelligence going singularity without anybody noticing... that's also an intriguing and somewhat worrying possibility. I'd like to think that won't be an accident and that anyone researching something capable of that would be using good containment practices, but that might not be enough, as AI-boxing experiments prove. And an AI aware of its containment and wanting to escape may vastly expand its intelligence just to outsmart its captors...
nkorslund 2 points · Jan 2015
Google is already a form of specialized intelligence. The internet as a whole is another, slightly broader form of specialized intelligence.
However, a human like "conscious" intelligence (or a goal-seeking agent) doesn't just spontaneously arise from chaos. Even in our brains it needs specific structure, as evident by that it takes very little brain damage in the right areas of the brain to make us essentially become vegetables. An AI capable of intelligent, goal-seeking action would (most likely) have to be designed or evolved specifically for that purpose.