Tyler Cowen has a post about his own entry in a Free Press mini-symposium on superintelligence: Mark Zuckerberg Says ‘Superintelligence’ Is Imminent. What Is It? What it is, to be honest, is a time-sink for people with more time & brains than sense. But what’s a poor guy to do, eh? I like Matt Britton’s observation: “Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement is more a reflection that Meta has fallen behind in the global AI arms race than it is an indication of a turning point in the company’s capabilities.” Cowen? He believes “that future AIs will be very smart and useful, but still will have significant limitations and will not achieve those milestones anytime soon.” OK, though judging from the way he toots the AI horn at Marginal Revolution I would have thought him to be more gung-ho.
Whatever.
Out of curiosity I went to Google's Ngram viewer and took a look at “superintelligence.”
Sure enough, the first real action occurs at 2014, with the publication of Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. But it lists a smattering of books before that. The oldest is Artificial Superintelligence, published in 1999 by one Azamat Abdoullaev. The most interesting is Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart (2000), by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and ABC Research Group. It has an index entry for “Laplace’s superintelligence,” by which they mean “Laplace’s demon,” Wikipedia:
According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every particle in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.
Hmmm....I wonder if the idea of superintelligence should now be dubbed “Bostrom’s demon”?
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