The World in 2030

74 The World in 2030
Machine Super-Intelligence
(Strong Artificial Intelligence)
If some of the above has left you breathless, I am afraid that
there are more breathtaking ideas to come in this survey of
likely (or almost certain) technological development in the
next twenty-five years. The first of these is super-intelligent
machines or, to use plain language, machines that are as
clever as you or me.
The science of trying to develop super-intelligent
machines used to be called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) and,
in the early 1980s, there was intense debate about how soon
AI could be developed and how soon really clever computers
would be helping surgeons, controlling traffic flows, running
air traffic control and generally making human life better
and safer.
But to the outside world the efforts of the AI community
appeared to fail and the quest to develop Artificial Intelligence
seemed to dissipate and fade away. In reality, it did no such
thing; it just developed in a way that was unexpected. Our
anthropomorphic impulses led us to assume that a humanlike
robot would spring from the artificial laboratories of the
1980s ready to become our companion. But twenty years
ago we hadn’t even begun to understand what a human was
either in terms of brain function or physiology. Our chances
of building a copy of ourselves at that time were zero.
However, sophisticated machine intelligence (albeit not
very human seeming) has been developed and deployed out