What is AI superintelligence? Could it destroy humanity? And is it really almost here?
Flora Salim, Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport & AI, UNSW Sydney. Maxim Berg / Unsplash In 2014, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a book about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) with the ominous title Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It proved […]
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the […]
Small is the next big thing
When working for a large organization, weeks can pass before leadership makes important decisions that affect you and your team. Meanwhile, you’re on the hook to deliver products that don’t actually serve the customer-products you know you could improve, if given the opportunity. After years of consulting for Fortune 1000 […]
Rachel Kushner’s revolutionary spy novel reflects on our hurtle towards extinction
-Alex Howard,Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney Rachel Kushner ranks among the finest novelists working today. The recipient of several major literary awards and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Kushner, who has a background in political economy and United States foreign policy, uses her fiction to explore […]
Book Review: Range by David Epstein
What is the best way to pursue excellence? Should you focus all your time, energy, and attention on a single pursuit? Or would it be wiser to dabble in several before committing to one? In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — an instant New York Times bestseller — David Epstein […]
Book Review: Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
From the author of Mayflies, an irresistible, unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel – the story of one man’s epic fall from grace. May 2021. London.Campbell Flynn – art historian and celebrity intellectual – is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and […]
An exposé of whatever-it-takes culture, Eric Beecher’s The Men Who Killed the News is an idealistic book for the times
Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne Disclosure statement Denis Muller was a colleague of Eric Beecher’s at The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s. Eric Beecher is a rare beast: a combination of journalist, media owner and idealist. In 1984, aged 33, he […]
Succession: Is a business plan important?
Maybe Aaron Sorkin should have written the Succession script…it might have made more sense! So…I finally got round to watching Succession, to see what it was all about and why so many people seemed to like it. Basing it on the Murdochs is a bit of a stretch, but a […]
Review: The Men Who Killed The News
Crikey owner and ex-News Corp and Fairfax editor lifts the lid on the abuse of power by media moguls – from William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk – and on his own unique experience of working for (and being sued by) the Murdochs. What’s gone wrong with our media? The answer: […]
Review: The Power Broker
By Robert A. Caro Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century. The Power Broker is a huge and galvanising biography revealing not only the saga of one man’s […]
Rupert Murdoch and the rise and fall of the press barons: how much power do newspapers still have?
Simon Potter, Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol Rupert Murdoch has been demonised as a puppet master who would pull the strings of politicians behind the scenes, as a man with too much power. But what influence did he and his fellow media moguls really wield? The day after […]
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
This is a book about where believers in Effective Altruism (EA), a philosophy for maximising the utility a person has, are coming from. If you can earn substantial money by working in finance, runs the argument, then rather than (for example) training as a doctor and benefitting society directly, you […]
What is AI superintelligence? Could it destroy humanity? And is it really almost here?
Flora Salim, Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport & AI, UNSW Sydney. Maxim Berg / Unsplash In 2014, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a book about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) with the ominous title Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It proved highly influential in promoting the idea that advanced AI systems – “superintelligences” more capable than humans – might one day take over the world and destroy humanity. A decade later, OpenAI boss Sam Altman says superintelligence may only be “a few thousand days” away. A year ago, Altman’s OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever set up a team within the company to focus on “safe superintelligence”, but he and his team have now raised a billion dollars to create a startup of their own to pursue this goal. What exactly are they talking about? Broadly speaking, superintelligence is anything more intelligent than humans. But unpacking what that might mean in practice can get a bit tricky. Different kinds of AI In my view the most useful way to think about different levels and kinds of intelligence in AI was developed by US computer scientist Meredith Ringel Morris and her colleagues at Google. Their framework lists six levels of AI performance: no AI, emerging, competent, expert, virtuoso and superhuman. It also makes an important distinction between narrow systems, which can carry out a small range of tasks, and more general systems. A narrow, no-AI system is something like a calculator. It carries out various mathematical tasks according to a set of explicitly programmed rules. There are already plenty of very successful narrow AI systems. Morris gives the Deep Blue chess program that famously defeated world champion Garry Kasparov way back in 1997 as an example of a virtuoso-level narrow AI system. Some narrow systems even have superhuman capabilities. One […]