SIAI stands for “Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence”, a educational and research group centered around the concept of the “Singularity”. The term Singularity is used to describe a distinct event - the creation of an intelligence smarter than Homo sapiens. Basically, an intelligence significantly smarter than any human genius, past or present. The Singularity Institute is attempting to trigger this event by serving as a magnet for people interested in contributing money to pay people to work full-time on the task of constructing a true Artificial Intelligence capable of improving its own source code in an open-ended way, without help from programmers.

All humans are members of the same species, with the same basic mental hardware. Our panhuman set of mental hardware is comparable to the panhuman set of physical hardware - arms, legs, muscles, organs, etc. These pieces of hardware may be larger or smaller, slightly faster or slightly slower, but share the same basic features and characteristics. Our ability to imagine and solve problems is fundamentally limited by our mental hardware. For example, it is impossible to hold more than 8 or so items in our working memory while solving a problem. We simply do not have the capacity. It is impossible for us to intuitively imagine complex, interconnected relationships beyond a maximum number of nodes. And the list goes on.

Homo sapiens is the first species capable of building a complex civilization. But it doesn’t mean we are the smartest type of mind that could potentially exist. In the possibility space, there must exist minds smarter than us as we are smarter than chimps. Problems which seem impossible to the smartest human geniuses might appear utterly simple to these smarter intelligences. A chimp genius is no match for an average human, and a human genius is no match for a genuinely smarter species.

Smartness is the quality that makes it impossible to write a story containing a character smarter than you are. You are truly incapable of imagining what they’d do. You can use crude literary devices like saying they’re capable of learning dozens of languages in a year, or memorizing 1000 digits of pi, but imagining the more subtle consequences of heightened intelligence is impossible.

Where do we find an intelligence smarter than humans? We could evolve one, by forbidding humans below a certain IQ level to have children. However this would take many thousands of years and would curtail fundamental human freedoms. We could wait for smarter-than-human aliens to arrive on this planet… but there is no evidence of aliens visiting this planet in its multi-billion year history and it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be stopping by our neighborhood anytime soon. So the next best option is to create one with technology.

All of the above is very difficult for a lot of people to process. Imagining something smarter than us is truly difficult. We tend to think that human geniuses represent the upper ceiling of what is theoretically possible. And when we imagine smarter-than-human intelligences, we are liable to underestimate the true novelty of the prospect. Understanding our particular human type of intelligence requires exposure to some amount of cognitive science.

The Singularity Institute is attempting to build an intelligence entirely outside the human realm, through the route of Artificial Intelligence. There are a few reasons why building an AI is likely to be simpler than commonly thought. First, an AI needn’t duplicate the full complexity of the human brain. Human intelligence evolved relatively recently, and most neurological complexity exists to facilitate all the survival instincts of animals we evolved from. Secondly, human intelligence is just a particular implementation of intelligence, designed blindly by evolution rather than purposefully by an intelligent designer. A plane is not as complicated as a bird. Thirdly, the underlying hardware - silicon - is inherently more flexible, reprogrammable, and rapid than neurons.

Greater intelligence, coupled together with the right initial motivations, could help humanity more than we can help ourselves. Some would argue that any smarter intelligence would inevitably see us as inferior. The Singularity Institute argues that this is a misconception based on the way humans are programmed by evolution to interact with each other.

Compared to the posts below, this is the longest and most confusing. That’s because the topic is so difficult to discuss because there are so many facets to it. However, I believe that working towards the creation of human-friendly, superhuman intelligence represents a humanitarian cause greater than any other. And I believe that the creation of a human-unfriendly superhuman intelligence represents a risk greater than any other. For more information, see the Singularity Institute’s website.