50 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
50 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
{{Draft|author=MBauwens|date=2026-02-02}}
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'''Superintelligence''' refers to a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest human minds across virtually all domains, including creativity, general wisdom, and problem-solving.
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== History ==
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James O'Sullivan traces the intellectual genealogy:
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<blockquote>
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"Superintelligence as a dominant AI narrative predates ChatGPT and can be traced back to the peculiar marriage of Cold War strategy and computational theory that emerged in the 1950s. The RAND Corporation, an archetypal think tank where nuclear strategists gamed out humanity's destruction, provided the conceptual nursery for thinking about intelligence as pure calculation, divorced from culture or politics.
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The early AI pioneers inherited this framework, and when Alan Turing proposed his famous test, he deliberately sidestepped questions of consciousness or experience in favor of observable behavior — if a machine could convince a human interlocutor of its humanity through text alone, it deserved the label 'intelligent.' This behaviorist reduction would prove fateful, as in treating thought as quantifiable operations, it recast intelligence as something that could be measured, ranked and ultimately outdone by machines.
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The computer scientist John von Neumann, as recalled by mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, spoke of a technological 'singularity' in which accelerating progress would one day mean that machines could improve their own design, rapidly bootstrapping themselves to superhuman capability."
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</blockquote>
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== The Politics of Superintelligence ==
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<blockquote>
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"The transformation of superintelligence from internet philosophy to boardroom strategy represents one of the most successful ideological campaigns of the 21st century. Tech executives who had previously focused on quarterly earnings and user growth metrics began speaking like mystics about humanity's cosmic destiny, and this conversion reshaped the political economy of AI development.
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OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring artificial intelligence benefits humanity, exemplifies this transformation. OpenAI has evolved into a peculiar hybrid, a capped-profit company controlled by a non-profit board, valued by some estimates at $500 billion, racing to build the very artificial general intelligence it warns might destroy us."
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</blockquote>
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== Discussion ==
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=== Alternative Imaginaries For The Age Of AI ===
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James O'Sullivan argues:
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<blockquote>
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"The dominance of superintelligence narratives obscures the fact that many other ways of doing AI exist, grounded in present social needs rather than hypothetical machine gods. These alternatives show that you do not have to join the race to superintelligence or renounce technology altogether. It is possible to build and govern automation differently now.
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The real political question is not whether some artificial superintelligence will emerge, but who gets to decide what kinds of intelligence we build and sustain. And the answer cannot be left to the corporate prophets of artificial transcendence because the future of AI is a political field — it should be open to contestation. It belongs not to those who warn most loudly of gods or monsters, but to publics that should have the moral right to democratically govern the technologies that shape their lives."
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</blockquote>
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== See Also ==
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* [[AI Constitutionalism]]
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* [[AI Governance]]
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* [[Effective Altruism]]
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== Source ==
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* [https://www.noemamag.com/the-politics-of-superintelligence/ "The Politics of Superintelligence" by James O'Sullivan - Noema Magazine]
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[[Category:AI]]
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[[Category:Philosophy]]
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[[Category:Technology]]
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[[Category:Futures]]
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