The Singularity offers a tremendous opportunity - bigger than any other - to solve the world's problems, from AIDS to poverty, starvation to war. There is no better way to confront problems than to improve our problem-solving ability. Intelligence and compassion are the solvents that eat away at all problems, sometimes with terrific speed.

Besides providing an opportunity to solve the world's problems, benevolent superintelligence could open up a vast expanse of new possibilities. Space travel, life extension, virtual reality, nanotechnology, brain reengineering - rather than throwing billions of dollars at these research projects for tiny returns, we can ally ourselves with superintelligence
and ensure that these technologies are developed quickly - and safely - and made available to everyone.

Superintelligence will be able to solve problems better and faster than humans ever could, plain and simple. By improving the speed of its underlying hardware, a superintelligence would be able to vastly accelerate the rate of its thinking. A superintelligence running on nanocomputers that perform computations a trillion times per second is much
faster than a human running on neurons that only operate at 100 times per second.

We can't place limits on what a superintelligence could accomplish, because we aren't superintelligent ourselves. Someone may say that a given problem is impossible, until an expert arrives and produces a solution almost instantly. A community of 1000 chimps may never be able to solve a problem, until a human idiot comes along and
thinks of the solution all the chimps missed. Little differences in the mind add up to big differences in the results.

What means would a superintelligence use to make the world a better place? It probably wouldn't use fleshy arms and fingers like humans do - those are too slow and inflexible. A superintelligence would invent its own way of influencing the world with its superior intelligence. Nanotechnology might offer a place to start, but it would only be a beginning. Like humans bypassed the performance of evolution with technology, superintelligence will bypass human performance by unknown means. A superintelligences would be able to manipulate reality far more rapidly and effectively than any number of human beings. A robustly benevolent superintelligence would be a really great thing.

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