How To Make AI The Best Thing To Happen To Us

Many leading AI researchers think that in a matter of decades, artificial intelligence will be able to do not merely some of our jobs, but all our jobs, forever transforming life on Earth. The reason that many dismiss this as science fiction is that we've traditionally thought of intelligence as something mysterious that can only exist in biological organisms, especially humans. But such carbon chauvinism is unscientific. From my perspective as a physicist and AI researcher, intelligence is simply a certain kind of information processing performed by elementary particles moving around, and there's no law of physics that says one can't build machines more intelligent than us in all ways. This suggests that we've only seen the tip of the intelligence iceberg, and that there's an amazing potential to unlock the full intelligence that's latent in nature and use it to help humanity flourish -- or flounder. If we get it right, the upside is huge: Since everything we love about civilization is the product of intelligence, amplifying our own intelligence with AI has the potential solving tomorrow's thorniest problems.