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SUPERINTELLIGENCE? REALLY?
President Trump announced at the United Nations on September 22 that he wants artificial intelligence to be called superintelligence. His reasoning is that the word artificial makes the technology sound fake, when its abilities are very real.
Anybody with an artificial knee knows artificial doesn't necessarily mean fake. But the president's announcement raises an interesting question. Just how intelligent have these machines become?
Imagine being handed a library containing thousands of books and being told that somewhere inside them is the answer to a question you've spent years trying to solve.
You might spend the rest of your life reading and never find it.
Give a properly equipped AI system access to that same library, and it could search enormous amounts of information, compare findings and identify connections in a fraction of the time.
Now imagine applying that ability to medicine, engineering, astronomy and other fields where researchers face more information than any one person could possibly absorb.
Add the tremendous speed of modern computers, capable of performing billions of calculations, and you begin to understand what makes AI extraordinary. It can process information and recognize patterns at a speed and scale no individual human being could match.
