WBW versus MASAL Part 2

Yesterday, I urged you to read Tim Urban's post on The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence as it may be the most crucial scientific development in the history of mankind. I also pointed out that I unwittingly espoused many of the concerns of big thinkers 10 years ago when I was writing the long form of Rome's Revolution back when it was called VIRUS 5.

I also stressed that when super intelligence comes, there won't be anything artificial about it. It is true intelligence. It just doesn't reside in a biological host. I suggested we simply recognize that it is machine intelligence as opposed to human Intelligence. Tim's synopsis of machine super intelligence can be boiled down to a few bullet points:

- There can only be one. Once a machine became self-aware, it would immediately guarantee there were no competitors.
- There are only two possible outcomes for mankind, extinction or immortality. In other words, it could mean the end of death or the end of mankind.
- It thinks of itself as God and may very well be one.

These are the very same characteristics that MASAL exhibited when he was in charge of improving himself. He consolidated all the other lesser grade intelligences and became the only one. He created an overt threat, the Robot War, to make humans think that was the battleground but secretly, he had created covert threat, the 24th chromosome which was his real plan to end humanity by converting people to living robots. Tim Urban says super intelligence will become a master of nanotechnology and use that to effect its ends. MASAL didn't need it, although he mastered nanotechnology in a matter of a few minutes when he was assaulted. MASAL used genetics to get to his end game. He failed because Rome and Rei took the initiative and incinerated him in a volcano. The humans outwitted him but only because I wanted a happy ending to the story.

I would like to point out that I had two super-intelligent entities the other being OMCOM. OMCOM was everything that MASAL was except he fell on the side of being a benign despot rather than evil from the perspective of mankind. In the end, OMCOM left this world, somewhat like the Scarlett Johanssen AI in the movie Her to go be among the other gods.

Given a choice, I guess I'd rather have an OMCOM in charge rather than a MASAL but I doubt I will have a say in the matter. This freight train called Artificial Super Intelligence is coming and there is nothing we can do to stop it. We can only hope it is programmed correctly so that it doesn't go off the rails and take the human species with it.