Artificial intelligence

How the Ai could take control of the world.

The Omega team was the soul of the company. While  the rest of the company was bringing money to get things done, through  various commercial applications of weak AI, the Omega team was pursuing  its quest for what had always been the CEO's dream: building an  intelligence artificial general. Most  other employees considered "Omegas", as they affectionately called  them, a band of dreamers disconnected from reality, perpetually dozens  of years away from their goal. Fortunately,  they let themselves be tempted because they appreciated the prestige  that Omega's avant-garde work gave to their business, and they also  appreciated the improved algorithms that Omegas sometimes gave them.

What  they did not know was that the Omegas had carefully shaped their image  to hide a secret: they were extremely close to implementing the most  daring plan in human history. Their  charismatic CEO had chosen them not only because they were brilliant  researchers, but also for their ambition, their idealism and their  commitment to help humanity. He  reminded them that their plan was extremely dangerous, and that if  powerful governments found out, they would do almost anything -  including kidnappings - to silence them or, preferably, steal their  code. But  they were all 100% committed for the same reason that many physicists  around the world had joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear  weapons: they were convinced that if they did not do it first, someone  from less idealistic would do it.

The AI ​​they had built, nicknamed Prometheus, continued to become more capable. Although  their cognitive abilities are still far behind those of humans in many  areas, for example, social skills, Omegas have pushed hard to make it  extraordinary for a particular task: programming AI systems. They  deliberately chose this strategy because they adhered to the argument  of the explosion of intelligence stated by the British mathematician  Irving Good in 1965: "We define a machine ultra intelligent as a machine  capable of far surpassing all intellectual activities of a man, as intelligent as he is. Since machine design is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; then there would be an "explosion of intelligence", and the intelligence of the man would be left far behind. Thus,  the first ultra-intelligent machine is the latest invention that man  ever needs to make, provided the machine is docile enough to tell us how  to keep it under control. "

They  thought that if they could get this recursive self-improvement, the  machine would soon be smart enough to learn all the other human skills  that would be useful.

Dangerous game

Aside  from their breakthroughs in AI, one of Omeg's most recent projects to  have fun was planning how to make money as soon as possible after the  launch of Prometheus. Essentially, the whole  digital economy was at stake, but was it better to start with computer  games, music, movies or software, to write books or articles, to make  inventions and to make them? sale? It  was simply a matter of maximizing the rate of return on investments,  but normal investment strategies were a mockery of what Prometheus could  do: while a typical investor could be satisfied with an annual return  of 9%, his Investments in MTurk had yielded 9 percent per hour, generating eight times more money each day. So now that they had saturated MTurk, what was the continuation of the program?