> It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. If you define intelligence as “bei

> It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. If you define intelligence as “being really good at chess” or “factoring prime numbers”, sure, computers are already smarter than us. If you define intelligence as “knowing when to let your child make mistakes on their own and when to help them”, or “knowing how to conduct an orchestra”, it doesn’t seem so extreme anymore. In fact, the opposite statement rings just as true: It is a paragon of human arrogance to assume that we will build things smarter than ourselves in every conceivable way. The road ahead looks more like a planet with its ecosystems ravaged by resource extraction, with buggy computerized systems we don’t understand running people’s lives in harmful ways (eg see all the writeups about machine learning reinforcing systemic biases) than a world full of meta humans in symbiosis with inconceivably intelligent machines of their own design.