Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization—a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
What of the seemingly more fanciful idea that the internet might one day “wake up”? Could the internet become something more than just the backbone of a loosely integrated collective superintelligence—something more like a virtual skull housing an emerging unified super-intellect?
It seems at least conceivable that such a web-based cognitive system, supersaturated with computer power and all other resources needed for explosive growth save for one crucial ingredient, could, when the final missing constituent is dropped into the cauldron, blaze up with superintelligence.
The fact that there are many paths that lead to superintelligence should increase our confidence that we will eventually get there.
Nothing in our definition of collective superintelligence implies that a society with greater collective intelligence is necessarily better off. The definition does not even imply that the more collectively intelligent society is wiser.
We can think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right.
On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits—a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone.
The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.
Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.
We know that blind evolutionary processes can produce human-level general intelligence, since they have already done so at least once. Evolutionary processes with foresight—that is, genetic programs designed and guided by an intelligent human programmer—should be able to achieve a similar outcome with far greater efficiency.
An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon.
A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 BC, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.
We find ourselves in a thicket of strategic complexity, surrounded by a dense mist of uncertainty.
There is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system.