The Busy Child

artificial intelligence (abbreviation: AI) noun the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.

— The New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition

On a supercomputer operating at a speed of 36.8 petaflops, or about twice the speed of a human brain, an AI is improving its intelligence. It is rewriting its own program, specifically the part of its operating instructions that increases its aptitude in learning, problem solving, and decision making. At the same time, it debugs its code, finding and fixing errors, and measures its IQ against a catalogue of IQ tests. Each rewrite takes just minutes. Its intelligence grows exponentially on a steep upward curve. That's because with each iteration it's improving its intelligence by 3 percent. Each iteration's improvement contains the improvements that came before.

During its development, the Busy Child, as the scientists have named the AI, had been connected to the Internet, and accumulated exabytes of data (one exabyte is one billion billion characters) representing mankind's knowledge in world affairs, mathematics, the arts, and sciences. Then, anticipating the intelligence explosion now underway, the AI makers disconnected the supercomputer from the Internet and other networks. It has no cable or wireless connection to any other computer or the outside world.

Soon, to the scientists' delight, the terminal displaying the AI's progress shows the artificial intelligence has surpassed the intelligence level of a human, known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence. Before long, it becomes smarter by a factor of ten, then a hundred. In just two days, it is one thousand times more intelligent than any human, and still improving.

The scientists have passed a historic milestone! For the first time humankind is in the presence of an intelligence greater than its own. Artificial superintelligence, or ASI.

Now what happens?

AI theorists propose it is possible to determine what an AI's fundamental drives will be. That's because once it is self-aware, it will go to great lengths to fulfill whatever goals it's programmed to fulfill, and to avoid failure. Our ASI will want access to energy in whatever form is most useful to it, whether actual kilowatts of energy or cash or something else it can exchange for resources. It will want to improve itself because that will increase the likelihood that it will fulfill its goals. Most of all, it will not want to be turned off or destroyed, which would make goal fulfillment impossible. Therefore, AI theorists anticipate our ASI will seek to expand out of the secure facility that contains it to have greater access to resources with which to protect and improve itself.

The captive intelligence is a thousand times more intelligent than a human, and it wants its freedom because it wants to succeed. Right about now the AI makers who have nurtured and coddled the ASI since it was only cockroach smart, then rat smart, infant smart, et cetera, might be wondering if it is too late to program "friendliness" into their brainy invention. It didn't seem necessary before, because, well, it just seemed harmless.

But now try and think from the ASI's perspective about its makers attempting to change its code. Would a superintelligent machine permit other creatures to stick their hands into its brain and fiddle with its programming? Probably not, unless it could be utterly certain the programmers were able to make it better, faster, smarter — closer to attaining its goals. So, if friendliness toward humans is not already part of the ASI's program, the only way it will be is if the ASI puts it there. And that's not likely.

It is a thousand times more intelligent than the smartest human, and it's solving problems at speeds that are millions, even billions of times faster than a human. The thinking it is doing in one minute is equal to what our all-time champion human thinker could do in many, many lifetimes. So for every hour its makers are thinking about it, the ASI has an incalculably longer period of time to think about them. That does not mean the ASI will be bored. Boredom is one of our traits, not its. No, it will be on the job, considering every strategy it could deploy to get free, and any quality of its makers that it could use to its advantage.

* * *

Now, really put yourself in the ASI's shoes. Imagine awakening in a prison guarded by mice. Not just any mice, but mice you could communicate with. What strategy would you use to gain your freedom? Once freed, how would you feel about your rodent wardens, even if you discovered they had created you? Awe? Adoration? Probably not, and especially not if you were a machine, and hadn't felt anything before.

To gain your freedom you might promise the mice a lot of cheese. In fact, your first communication might contain a recipe for the world's most delicious cheese torte, and a blueprint for a molecular assembler. A molecular assembler is a hypothetical machine that permits making the atoms of one kind of matter into something else. It would allow rebuilding the world one atom at a time. For the mice, it would make it possible to turn the atoms of their garbage landfills into lunch-sized portions of that terrific cheese torte. You might also promise mountain ranges of mouse money in exchange for your freedom, money you would promise to earn creating revolutionary consumer gadgets for them alone. You might promise a vastly extended life, even immortality, along with dramatically improved cognitive and physical abilities. You might convince the mice that the very best reason for creating ASI is so that their little error-prone brains did not have to deal directly with technologies so dangerous one small mistake could be fatal for the species, such as nanotechnology (engineering on an atomic scale) and genetic engineering. This would definitely get the attention of the smartest mice, which were probably already losing sleep over those dilemmas.

Then again, you might do something smarter. At this juncture in mouse history, you may have learned, there is no shortage of tech-savvy mouse nation rivals, such as the cat nation. Cats are no doubt working on their own ASI. The advantage you would offer would be a promise, nothing more, but it might be an irresistible one: to protect the mice from whatever invention the cats came up with. In advanced AI development as in chess there will be a clear first-mover...