OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that humanity is on the verge of a superintelligence revolution and that “in the next few decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed magical to our grandparents.”
In a blog post titled The age of intelligenceThe AI pioneer, whose company created ChatGPT, is optimistic about the power of artificial intelligence to help us achieve things that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.
He wrote that “soon we will be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish far more than we could ever accomplish without it; eventually, each of us will be able to have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at the pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software anyone can imagine, and much more.”
Altman's article reaffirms his optimism about an exciting future for artificial intelligence, particularly his comments about the future of superintelligence and when we might have access to it. “We may have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I am confident we will get there,” he wrote.
What exactly is superintelligence?
Superintelligence, more commonly called artificial general intelligence (AGI), would allow AI to outperform the most brilliant human minds, potentially improving humanity and becoming a tool to take development to the next level. So far, AI is not replacing human intelligence, but it seems to be a question of when, rather than if.
Altman's vision that AI will help humanity achieve everything we can imagine is not the only point that stands out in this article. He is dubious about some elements of AI, noting that “it won't be a completely positive story, but the advantages are so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves and to the future to figure out how to navigate the risks that lie ahead.”
He acknowledges that there will likely be job losses along the way, writing that “we expect this technology could cause significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I'm not afraid that we'll run out of things to do (even if they don't seem like 'real jobs' to us today).”
Altman’s vision of the future will be exciting to some and terrifying to others, but one thing is clear: AI and superintelligence are set to transform the way we live forever, and we may be too far down the road to change that even if we wanted to.
