capabilities emerge from regular physical processses, which we can trace down to the level of electrons, photons, quarks, and gluons. Evidently, brute matter can get pretty smart.
Let me summarize the argument. From two strongly supported hypotheses, we’ve drawn a straightforward conclusion:
e Human mind emerges from matter.
e Matter is what physics says it is.
e Therefore, the human mind emerges from physical processes we understand and can reproduce artificially.
e Therefore, natural intelligence is a special case of artificial intelligence.
Of course, our “astonishing corollary” could fail; the first two lines of this argument are hypotheses. But their failure would have to bring in a foundation-shattering discovery—a significant new phenomenon, with large-scale physical consequences, which takes place in unremarkable, well-studied physical circumstances (1.e., the materials, temperatures, and pressures inside human brains) yet which has somehow managed for many decades to elude determined investigators armed with sophisticated instruments. Such a discovery would be. . . astonishing.
ID. The Future of Intelligence
It is part of human nature to improve on human bodies and minds. Historically, clothing, eyeglasses, and watches are examples of increasingly sophisticated augmentations that enhance our toughness, perception, and awareness. They are major improvements to the natural human endowment, whose familiarity should not blind us to their depth. Today smartphones and the Internet are bringing the human drive toward augmentation into realms more central to our identity as intelligent beings. They are giving us, in effect, quick access to a vast collective awareness and a vast collective memory.
At the same time, autonomous artificial intelligences have become world champions in a wide variety of “cerebral” games, such as chess and Go, and have taken over many sophisticated pattern-recognition tasks, such as reconstructing what happened during complex reactions at the Large Hadron Collider from a blizzard of emerging particle tracks, to find new particles; or gathering clues from fuzzy X-ray, fMRI, and other types of images, to diagnose medical problems.
Where is this drive toward self-enhancement and innovation taking us? While the precise sequence of events and the timescale over which they’ll play out is impossible to predict (or, at least, beyond me), some basic considerations suggest that eventually the most powerful embodiments of mind will be quite different things from human brains as we know them today.
Consider six factors whereby information-processing technology exceeds human capabilities—vastly, qualitatively, or both:
e Speed: The orchestrated motion of electrons, which is the heart of modern artificial information-processing, can be much faster than the processes of diffusion and chemical change by which brains operate. Typical modern computer clock rates approach 10 gigahertz, corresponding to 10 billion operations per second. No single measure of speed applies to the bewildering variety of brain processes, but one fundamental limitation is latency of action
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