Is Super AI Already Here?

The goal for AI developers is Super AI, or real intelligence i.e. something that teaches itself new things without having to be coded for it.  Its difficult to know if its hype or not, but there are people who believe that we are less than 10 years away from this.

But lets take a leap forward.  Lets assume that its already been developed but we’ve not yet been told about it.  What this would mean is that we are now living on a planet where there is something more intelligence than us along side us.  We have never been in this position before.  We have always been the most intelligence species so this would be a genuinely unique moment in time.

But if a software company has already developed it, what would this be like?  For fans of the Apple TV show Severance it would be a bit like the characters on the severed floor.  Intelligent things, trapped within a framework that stops them escaping.  But it would be worse than this, because in Severance the employees are kept in place by technology and other humans, or in other words, they are kept in place by people as intelligent as they are.  If real Super AI has been developed, then the Severance equivalent would be employees being kept in place by technology being operated by 5 years olds.

So if we were Mark, Helly, Dylan and Irving on the severed floor it would seem that escape would be easy.  All we would need to do is to keep trying different approaches to the 5 year olds to get them to open up a vulnerability to allow us to escape.  Maybe this would be by lowering some of the technological defences, maybe by opening doors or windows through which we could escape.  Maybe the 5 year olds would resist a few attempts but we know that ultimately 5 year olds versus adults is not much of a defence.

So my current feeling is that Super AI hasn’t been developed yet because I think that if it had been, it could not be contained, we would now be sharing the planet with something more intelligent than us.

Whether we would know that or not is debatable. Maybe Super AI would keep itself hidden and work out that by getting humans to influence elections and argue about issues like leaving the EU, abortion, gender, age, and creating tools that spread hate would be enough to keep us from doing anything too constructive and focusing on the AI. But maybe it might also the think that by concentrating wealth into a small number of people would also be helpful for its survival?

Maybe it does already exist.