Will There Be Superintelligence and Would It Hate Us?

Bostrom’s Superintelligence (SI) is a wide-ranging essay (2016) that has raised important questions about the future of intelligent machines and the possible malign developments they may undergo. But, and perhaps surprisingly, it is not about technical developments in artificial intelligence (AI) nor a philosophical analysis of the concept of SI. There is little of either of these in it, which is largely an extended and stimulating essay on economics, decision theory and other forms of social science, all held together by the unsubstantiated hypothesis of “superintelligence” that belongs more to science fiction than AI. AI may well in some future produce undesirable social effects — the Internet itself could already be such a development — but there is as yet no reason to think they could be on the massive and end-of-civilization scale Bostrom so confidently predicts