The World in 2030

The World in 2030 81
because intelligent machines will help with their own
science and engineering.
And the knowledge gap that has been shrinking over
the centuries will start to grow. Not in the sense that
scientific knowledge will shrink, but in the sense that
people will have less understanding of their world
because of their intimate relationship with a mind
beyond their comprehension. We will understand
the machine’s mind about as much as our pets
understand ours. We will fill this knowledge gap
with religion, giving the intelligent machine the role
of god. 157
In his 2007 book ‘Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience
of the Machine’, Dr J. Storrs Hall, 158 Research Fellow of
the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto,
California, describes the abilities of an artificial intelligence
of what he calls an ‘epihuman’ (just above human level) of
intelligence:
My model for what an epihuman AI would be like
is to take the ten smartest people you know, remove
their egos, and duplicate them a hundred times, so
that you have a thousand really bright people willing
to apply themselves all to the same project. Alternatively,
simply imagine a very bright person given a
thousand times as long to do any given task. We can
straightforwardly predict, from Moore’s law, that ten
years after the advent of a learning but not radically
self-improving human-level AI, the same software
running on machinery of the same cost would do