Years ago I remember reading one of Ray Kurzweil’s books where he discussed the idea that our human, organic, carbon-based life form was just an evolutionary stepping stone to a higher order, non-organic intelligence. In other words, our future would not be inhabited by humans and super intelligent machines – WE are in the process of evolving into super intelligent machines.
Elon Musk makes the (pretty convincing) argument that this process is already well under way. Our smartphones are not physically attached to us – or are they? A pretty good argument could be made that having instant access to the worlds knowledge is already fundamentally changing the neurological functioning of our brain. He has started a new company called Neuralink that is discussed in Tim Urban’s wonderful blog here.
One of his core ideas that motivated the genesis of this venture is that our only protection against strong AI is to merge WITH strong AI…
Welcome to the future – it’s going to be a bumpy ride!