“People say that with any given technology people tend to overestimate its effects in the short term and underrate it in the long term. That’s my attitude towards AI. There’s a lot of hype right now. It may not change our lives completely in the next twenty years, but in the next 200 years it’s probably going to transform everything. And one of the reasons why is because AI builds into it this self-enhancing and self-perpetuating mechanism of exploring and expanding the space of possible minds. With the early AI programming, you had to design them yourself. Alan Turing wrote a program in which he built some very simple rules of thumb for playing chess. And it played chess, though not very well. Now, the chess-playing systems, like AlphaGo, learn to play chess from scratch and do so amazingly well.
Learning serves as a method for moving ahead in this space of possible minds. Start from a pretty simple mind and the capacity to learn, and it gets somewhere. Evolution is another such method. I expect to see AI exploit the evolutionary methods, where we have some kind of system of artificial evolution among a bunch of different AI programs, and their capacities expand in surprising and unpredictable ways over time, thereby also getting us far beyond that starting point. Learning and evolution in computers is a way to expand that space of mind.”
