For the purpose of thinking about the Singularity, though, the most important fiber in our bundle of cognitive skills is computer programming (and a range of related abilities, like theoretical computer science). This is the main bottleneck for superintelligent AI. Once we develop AI with enough programming abilities to give itself even more programming skill (whether on its own or with human assistance), there’ll be a positive feedback loop. Alan Turing’s colleague I. J. Good foresaw as early as 1965 that this would lead to an “intelligence explosion.”[138] And because computers operate much
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