Where are we currently? ANI

“As of now, humans have conquered the lowest caliber of AI — ANI — in many ways, and it’s everywhere:”¹²

“Cars are full of ANI systems, from the computer that figures out when the anti-lock brakes kick in, to the computer that tunes the parameters of the fuel injection systems.”¹³

“Google search is one large ANI brain with incredibly sophisticated methods for ranking pages and figuring out what to show you in particular. Same goes for Facebook’s Newsfeed.”¹⁴

Email spam filters “start off loaded with intelligence about how to figure out what’s spam and what’s not, and then it learns and tailors its intelligence to your particular preferences.”¹⁵

Passenger planes are flown almost entirely by ANI, without the help of humans.

“Google’s self-driving car, which is being tested now, will contain robust ANI systems that allow it to perceive and react to the world around it.”¹⁶

“Your phone is a little ANI factory … you navigate using your map app, receive tailored music recommendations from Pandora, check tomorrow’s weather, talk to Siri.”¹⁷

“The world’s best Checkers, Chess, Scrabble, Backgammon, and Othello players are now all ANI systems.”¹⁸

“Sophisticated ANI systems are widely used in sectors and industries like military, manufacturing, and finance (algorithmic high-frequency AI traders account for more than half of equity shares traded on US markets¹⁹).”²⁰

“ANI systems as they are now aren’t especially scary. At worst, a glitchy or badly-programed ANI can cause an isolated catastrophe like”²¹ a plane crash, a nuclear power plant malfunction, or “a financial markets disaster (like the 2010 Flash Crash when an ANI program reacted the wrong way to an unexpected situation and caused the stock market to briefly plummet, taking $1 trillion of market value with it, only part of which was recovered when the mistake was corrected) … But while ANI doesn’t have the capability to cause an existential threat, we should see this increasingly large and complex ecosystem of relatively-harmless ANI as a precursor of the world-altering hurricane that’s on the way. Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI and ASI.”²²

What’s Next? Challenges Behind Reaching AGI

“Nothing will make you appreciate human intelligence like learning about how unbelievably challenging it is to try to create a computer as smart as we are … Build a computer that can multiply ten-digit numbers in a split second — incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat — spectacularly difficult. Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done. Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old’s picture book and not just recognise the words but understand the meaning of them? Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it.”²³

Why are “hard things — like calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation … mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things — like vision, motion, movement, and perception — are insanely hard for it”²⁴?

“Things that seem easy to us are actually unbelievably complicated. They only seem easy because those skills have been optimized in us (and most animals) by hundreds of million years of animal evolution. When you reach your hand up toward an object, the muscles, tendons, and bones in your shoulder, elbow, and wrist instantly perform a long series of physics operations, in conjunction with your eyes, to allow you to move your hand in a straight line through three dimensions … On the other hand, multiplying big numbers or playing chess are new activities for biological creatures and we haven’t had any time to evolve a proficiency at them, so a computer doesn’t need to work too hard to beat us.”²⁵

One fun example…