Facts

• WHAT IS AI? Artificial intelligence, AI, is simply non-biological intelligence. Intelligence is often defined as the ability to accomplish goals. Early AI systems, like the one that first beat humans at chess, had skills programmed by humans, while today's best AI instead learns its own skills from large amounts of data.^[1]
• CURRENT USES: Early AI had a narrow skill set, say chess-playing or speech recognition. Today, AI is getting gradually broader skills, and like human intelligence, it's now used in every industry. AI advises us with chatbots and virtual assistants, and recommends who should get a job, a loan, or parole. AI helps us write and translate, entertains us with art, music and poetry, and perhaps tricks us with deepfakes. It dominates trading on Wall Street, diagnoses disease, and accelerates science. Online, AI recommends what ads, products, social media posts and search results to show us, and what to block or filter as spam. On the road, AI supports ride-sharing, navigation, traffic management, and autonomous vehicles. It powers ever more powerful surveillance and ever more autonomous weapons.^[2]
• AGI: The original goal of AI was building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which like a human child can choose to learn any skill at human level and therefore do any human job when robotically embodied. Surveys have shown that most AI researchers expect AGI within decades, but with strong differences of opinion.^[3]
• SUPERINTELLIGENCE: If AGI is built, then since it can do all jobs as well as humans, it can take over AI development too. This raises the controversial possibility that AI will start recursively self-improving, repeatedly doubling its power much faster than on the human R&D timescale, producing superintelligence that leaves human intelligence far behind. Some view this "rapture of the geeks" with excitement, while others fear that humanity will lose control and get replaced.^[4]