58 and a Half Hours/Author's Comments 2
In case you hadn't guessed already, I've pretty much been describing my own ideal world.
This story was inspired by the story "Friendship is Optimal" at FiMFiction, a story I was pointed to in the comments of an article about AI. If you're going to read it, I'd also recommend reading the related stories by Eakin, namely "The Law Offices of Artemis, Stella, and Beat", "The Longest Night", "Psychopathy is Configurable", and "All the Myriad Worlds".
Naturally after reading "Friendship is Optimal" and enjoying it, I got to thinking, besides the obvious bugs CelestAI had and how to fix them, what sort of world would I want to live in? And what would it take to actually live out some of my fantasies? That's basically the explanation for most of the handwaves; it's something I want, and so the universe described in this story makes it so.
But I'm getting away from myself. Besides giving myself a hopeful future to fantasize about, I kind of wanted to point out a possible future for everyone; one where you can live out your heart's desires.
The power and nature of artificial intelligence is frequently misrepresented in media and news. It can be divided into three categories. There's artificial narrow intelligence, which we have right now, wherein a computer is far better at a specific task than any human, but only at that specific task. There's artificial general intelligence, where a computer is generally as good at any task you assign it as a human, and is able to port knowledge gained from one task to apply to a different task. And finally, there's artificial superintelligence, where a computer is far better at every assigned task than any human can hope to be.
Due to the concept of recursive self improvement, it is likely that the space between artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence is actually very small. The idea behind recursive self improvement is that once a computer is as smart as a human, it can use that intelligence to upgrade itself. The now slightly smarter computer can use its new intelligence to give itself a larger boost, faster. The effect keeps compounding, until, within a matter of days from having built your artificial intelligence, you have a greater gulf of intelligence between it and us than there is between us and a jellyfish.
A superintelligence with a well thought out function could essentially function as a genie to humanity, fulfilling our wishes. That is the future I hope for.