Exponential self-improvement may or may not happen. I'm of the opinion that it will. The first AI is likely to be vastly suboptimal and just thrown together. Th

Exponential self-improvement may or may not happen. I'm of the opinion that it will. The first AI is likely to be vastly suboptimal and just thrown together. The very first thing that actually works, but not the best possible thing (same is true of humans.) Therefore there are likely to be lots of optimizations and improvements that can be made - low hanging fruit. So lots of progress will happen very quickly until it starts to approach the actual limits. But those limits don't have to be anything near humans. Transistors are many thousands of times faster than neurons. It will have massively superior serial processing power, which is good at doing optimization tasks (i.e. the kind of tasks we want it to do or that will be useful in improving itself.) They are general purpose and can be reprogrammed for specific tasks, unlike our brains. And we can create infinitely many instances of them to work on every conceivable problem in parallel, and share resources (human brains are quite limited at that.) There is Plenty of Room Above Us: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/2011/plenty-of-room-above-us/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/2011/plenty-of-room-above-u...