Introduction: How to Build an ASI

First things first: what is an ASI? ASI is short for Artificial Superintelligence, which informally means any non-biological thing (in practice, a computer, embodied or not) that's more intelligent than even Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and your personal favorite genius. Intelligent here refers to one's ability to reach one's goals in a wide variety of environments; we will go deeper into this definition in a later post, but this will do for now. Given our brain's small size and low signaling speed, it seems unlikely that peak human intelligence is the maximum level physically possible. We'll go into more detail about this in a later post as well. So why is ASI interesting?