Superintelligence Now! — How We Get To Next — Medium

Final paragraphs from a superintelligence reality check by Steven Johnson

"The fact that some of us are still debating whether global warming is even happening shows us that we’re still not experts at this kind of thinking. But in a way, those failures are understandable: It’s hard enough to project forward 50 years as an individual, much less as a society. But debates like the ones we are having today about AI make it clear that we are beginning to exercise these cognitive muscles. With AI, all the projections of future threats may well turn out to be false alarms, either because true AI turns out to be far more difficult to achieve, or because, as Stewart Brand suggests, we discover new techniques that minimize the danger before the machines march on past Mount Einstein. But if artificial superintelligence does turn out to pose an existential threat, our best defense will likely come out of our own new powers of human superintelligence: hypothesizing, predicting, simulating, thinking ahead."

Superintelligence Now! — How We Get To Next — Medium