Superhuman

What if having human, or even superhuman Artificial Intelligence (let’s call it SuperAI) would turn out NOT to be the worst nightmare of humankind? What if, after dogs, SuperAI is the biggest friend of Homo Sapiens? We have all seen movies in which AI turns against humans, with robots ranging from the ‘ethereal’ (was it on the cloud?) Hal to embodied metal-made Terminators, to a mix of the two, e.g. Ultron in the latest Avengers. But what if humankind would be doomed without SuperAI?

It is hard to grasp it now, but these very days, we are seeing the emergence of a form of intelligence that can beat humans at.... human tasks: AI that is better and faster than humans at very specific chores, e.g., reading signs (e.g., see here), handwritten digits, even CAT scans. This is all for the good: technology that enables faster diagnosis, can read road signs/checks with unparalleled accuracy, or can name the identity of a person from millions of faces in a dataset in a couple of seconds. SuperAI is beginning to unlock capabilities that will propel not only startups, but big enterprise, and ultimately billions of consumers to the next phase: pervasive intelligent devices. All machines that have either a small processor (the equivalent of a cell phone) or a wireless connection could benefit from superhuman intelligence at the service all of us.

In a sense, SuperAI has the same role today which coal had for the Industrial revolution. Let the fun begin.