Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of creating machines and systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as perception, reasoning, learning, decision making, and creativity. AI has made remarkable progress in recent years, achieving feats such as defeating world champions in chess and Go, recognizing faces and objects in images and videos, generating realistic text and speech from prompts, and driving cars autonomously.
But what if AI could do more than just mimic human intelligence? What if AI could surpass human intelligence and become capable of improving itself without human intervention? This is the scenario that some experts call the intelligence explosion, or the singularity, and it could have profound implications for the future of humanity.
The idea of the intelligence explosion was first proposed by the mathematician and computer scientist I.J. Good in 1965. He wrote: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”
