How CAN superintelligence make us superhuman?
Published · last edited · 913 words · ~5 min read
And when I say "us," I don't mean tech workers, white-collar workers, people in first-world countries, or anything so narrow. Having been studying CS/AI in college for four years now (wow, only 4?! Indeed, if I count from the start of my Freshman year in July 2022), I've heard plenty of people talking about CS majors or Software Engineers or the Tech Community as if they're the only people that exist. Most of it revolves around AI:
"Everyone's using AI these days!"
"AI is changing the world for everyone!"
"Did you know ABC company did XYZ? This is so important and everyone must know and care about this!"
And maybe this is true, among all our friends and classmates and the pieces of the outside world we see. Usually, it is true in the communities and industries we care about.
But the majority of the people who live in this world are not CS majors, or they don't work in tech, or they're walking down a path so different from me (or you, dear reader, because I reckon anyone who runs into my portfolio probably pursues the same general profession as me) that we didn't even think of it before we said these things.
Let me give you an example. Setting the scene: it was August 2023, about 8 months after the release of ChatGPT that sent the tech community into constant turmoil for the foreseeable future.
The sun was setting over the magnificent Yellowstone National Park, where your author (me) was enjoying a nice warm summer evening by the Grand Geyser, waiting for its next anticipated eruption around 8:00 PM. I waited, and waited, and waited, and the foretold time came and gone with no sign of the promised scalding burst of water rising from the sun-scorched earth.
Bored, I started talking to a boy of similar age next to me (unfortunately I've forgotten his name), whose family was also waiting, and we started off with some mundane topics and gradually move onto more specific questions.
At one point, I got curious and asked him what he thought about ChatGPT. And I got the most insightful response I've ever gotten when I asked someone about AI:
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"What's ChatGPT?"
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Kabloom, Kablam, Skadoosh, Wapow, insert more sound effects here because my mind was blown. Because, as famous and prolific as it was in my life, I could not imagine SOMEBODY, EIGHT MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE, DID NOT KNOW WHAT CHATGPT WAS.
This story repeated itself again, in less dramatic detail, that December, in an Uber to the airport. My driver found out I was a CS student, and he started trying to get me to make a startup with him. I think he was being serious. But I told him to consult ChatGPT first, and I had to explain to the second person in my life what this "new" thing is.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Everyone lives in a kind of bubble. I think the tech community in particular lives in a particularly bad one because it's such a big field and a lot of us interact exclusively (not usually on purpose) with other tech community members and there's GENUINELY a lot of hype and progress in it these days.
But that means it's hard to see outside our bubble a lot of the times.
AI is simultaneously more and less ubiquitous than we think. More, because it's probably involved in a lot of processes we don't really think about, but also less, because there's still so many people that don't think about it.
So, I think the biggest way for us to become superhuman is to put superintelligence SAFELY, RESPONSIBLY, and EFFECTIVELY into the hands of EVERYONE.
Today, it can help a software engineer write 1000 lines of code a day instead of 100. But it might not be able to help an abused child get the help they need. It can help a doctor diagnose a rare disease. But it's not helping who's living paycheck to paycheck find a better life.
Of course, these are VAST oversimplifications. Solving child abuse or raising quality of life for all is SO MUCH more than technological problems. In fact, haphazard use of technology will actively harm the situation. Heck, often even careful use of technology sometimes has unintentionally negative consequences.
But technology -- like AI -- is a tool. It can't solve a problem by itself, but combined with passionate people, intentional efforts, and a lot of grit and resilience, it's a tool and it CAN enable us to do what we never could've imagined before.
Of course, we have to consider responsible governance, safety, concentration of power, the 10% chance for AI to kill all humans in the next decade (hi Anthropic), and such.
I'm not de-valuing these concerns; in fact, I think they're the most important ones. But there are many more coherent and well-researched articles about those topics.
Here, I want us to conceptualize the larger world that we live in and see AI in its best possible light and realize what it can do for us -- keeping in mind that all of this is 100% predicated upon the responsible use of the technology (in whatever definition you choose to assign "responsible").
We humans got to where we are by inventing and using tools. AI is no different. The technology is still in its infancy, but learning how to use it CAN let us become superhuman.