The Push to Build AI Superintelligence is Deeply Alarming

"The painful truth that's really beginning to sink in is that we're much closer to figuring out how to build this stuff than we are figuring out how to control it."

The push to build AI superintelligence is deeply alarming, says MIT professor Max Tegmark.

"My laptop runs about 1 billion times faster than my brain…Once machines start improving themselves, they can get as much smarter than us…as we are smarter than snails. And if you had the idea that some snails were going to control us—or they were going to build us, and then control us—you should laugh at this.

So what I describe now is what's known as superintelligence, which is what probably will come not long after artificial general intelligence. And this is exactly what Alan Turing warned about."

"Are we going to just throw away the keys to the planet by building some alien, amoral machine species that just replaces us?"