The AI Revolution: The Road to

Superintelligence
January 22, 2015 By Tim Urban

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Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on
Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that
what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most
important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once
I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation
and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke
it into two parts. This is Part 1—Part 2 is here.

_______________

We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor
Vinge

What does it feel like to stand here?

It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing—but then you have to remember
something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your
right. So here’s how it actually feels to stand there:

Which probably feels pretty normal…

_______________
 The Far Future—Coming Soon
Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a
permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or
firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you
retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to
everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny
capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the
ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a
musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard
rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment,
generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at
someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the
country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the
internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider,
nuclear weapons, or general relativity.

This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those

words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.

But here’s the interesting thing—if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we
got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time
machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500,
bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a
lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him,
because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than
1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and
physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new
imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception.
But watching everyday life go by in 1750—transportation, communication, etc.—
definitely wouldn’t make him die.

No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with him, he’d have to go
much farther back—maybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First
Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. If
someone from a purely hunter-gatherer world—from a time when humans were, more
or less, just another animal species—saw the vast human empires of 1750 with their
towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being “inside,” and their
enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discovery—he’d
likely die.

And then what if, after dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went
back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000 BC, he’d
show the guy everything and the guy would be like, “Okay what’s your point who cares.”
For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, he’d have to go back over 100,000 years
and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time.
In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock
they’d experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a “die level of progress,” or
a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved. So a DPU took over 100,000 years in
hunter-gatherer times, but at the post-Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about
12,000 years. The post-Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750
person only needs to go forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to have happened.

This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what
futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens
because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less
advanced societies—because they’re more advanced. 19th century humanity knew
more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so it’s no surprise that
humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century—15th
century humanity was no match for 19th century humanity.11← open these

This works on smaller scales too. The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and
“the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to 1955, he
was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for
shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yes—but if the
movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have had
much more fun with much bigger differences. The character would be in a time before
personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly, a teenager born in
the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movie’s Marty McFly
was in 1955.

This is for the same reason we just discussed—the Law of Accelerating Returns. The
average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate
between 1955 and 1985—because the former was a more advanced world—so much
more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.

So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly.
This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?

Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century would have been
achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement in the year 2000—in other words,
by 2000, the rate of progress was five times faster than the average rate of progress
during the 20th century. He believes another 20th century’s worth of progress
happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century’s worth of progress
will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th
century’s worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later,
in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil
believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th
century.2

If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct, then we may be as blown away
by 2030 as our 1750 guy was by 2015—i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple
decades—and the world in 2050 might be so vastly different than today’s world that we
would barely recognize it.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s what many scientists smarter and more knowledgeable
than you or I firmly believe—and if you look at history, it’s what we should logically
predict.

So then why, when you hear me say something like “the world 35 years from now might
be totally unrecognizable,” are you thinking, “Cool….but nahhhhhhh”? Three reasons
we’re skeptical of outlandish forecasts of the future:

1) When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. When we imagine the

progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an
indicator of how much will likely happen. When we think about the extent to which the
world will change in the 21st century, we just take the 20th century progress and add it
to the year 2000. This was the same mistake our 1750 guy made when he got someone
from 1500 and expected to blow his mind as much as his own was blown going the
same distance ahead. It’s most intuitive for us to think linearly, when we should be
thinking exponentially. If someone is being more clever about it, they might predict the
advances of the next 30 years not by looking at the previous 30 years, but by taking the
current rate of progress and judging based on that. They’d be more accurate, but still
way off. In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving
at a much faster rate than they’re moving now.

2) The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. First, even a
steep exponential curve seems linear when you only look at a tiny slice of it, the same
way if you look at a little segment of a huge circle up close, it looks almost like a straight
line. Second, exponential growth isn’t totally smooth and uniform. Kurzweil explains that
progress happens in “S-curves”:

An S is created by the wave of progress when a new paradigm sweeps the world. The
curve goes through three phases:

1. Slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth)

2. Rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth)
3. A leveling off as the particular paradigm matures3