Artificial Superintelligence

Beyond Human Intelligence

Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) refers to AI that significantly surpasses the cognitive capabilities of the brightest humans in virtually every domain—scientific reasoning, social intelligence, creativity, strategic thinking, and more.

This isn't just "very smart AI." It's intelligence of a qualitatively different order. The gap between a superintelligence and Einstein might be larger than the gap between Einstein and a mouse.

Types of Superintelligence

Nick Bostrom distinguishes three forms superintelligence might take:

Speed superintelligence: Thinks like a human but millions of times faster. Could do a century of research in a day.

Collective superintelligence: Many human-level intelligences networked together, like a civilization of minds operating as one.

Quality superintelligence: Thinks in ways that are fundamentally more capable—not just faster or more numerous, but better. Novel concepts and reasoning patterns humans cannot grasp.

In practice, an ASI would likely combine all three: faster, more parallelized, and qualitatively superior.

The Path from AGI to ASI

Once AGI exists, the transition to superintelligence might be rapid:

Recursive improvement: An AGI smart enough to improve itself could quickly become smarter than humans at AI research, accelerating its own enhancement.

Hardware efficiency: An AGI could design better chips and algorithms, translating existing hardware into more intelligence.

Parallelization: Unlike human researchers, an AI can spawn copies of itself to work on problems in parallel.

The time from AGI to ASI could be years, months, or even days depending on how these dynamics unfold.

Why ASI Is Hard to Predict

We cannot easily predict what a superintelligence would do because we cannot think the thoughts it would think. Like a child trying to anticipate the strategies of an adult expert, we lack the cognitive capacity to model a mind that exceeds our own.

This is why alignment—ensuring ASI pursues goals compatible with human flourishing—is so critical. We need to get it right before we have a superintelligence, because after, we may not be able to correct course.

Implications of ASI

A well-aligned superintelligence could solve problems that have plagued humanity for millennia:

• Cure all diseases and reverse aging
• Develop unlimited clean energy
• End material poverty through advanced manufacturing
• Expand consciousness throughout the cosmos

A misaligned superintelligence could end humanity—not necessarily through malice, but through indifference, pursuing goals that incidentally make human survival impossible.

The Decisive Moment

The creation of ASI may be the most important event in human history—or the last event. Whether it goes well depends on choices we make in the years before it arrives, particularly around alignment research and responsible development practices.

This is why many researchers consider ASI safety the most important problem we face.