Futurist and philosopher Melanie Swan has a thought-provoking and well-written Edge essay response to the question, “What do you think about machines that think?” She suggests a cafeteria approach to future intelligence, envisioning, among other things, a world in which humans enhanced cognitively would share terrain with those unenhanced.

I wonder about that. Today’s wealth inequality has caused problems and may lead to more serious ones (especially if Narrow AI is the job killer it appears to be), but that’s nothing compared to what would likely happen if superintelligent people were living aside those of much inferior thinking ability. Homo sapiens had company from several other species of humans at one point not too long ago, but we finished vanquishing them all with the fall of the Neanderthals, and perhaps we didn’t even do it on purpose. The sweep of our progress may have just swept everyone else away. Tremendous disparity in future intelligence may lead to something similar whether we’re talking about an intramural contest among humans, or humans vying with sentient machines, should they develop. The writer believes in “trust-building models for inter-species digital intelligence,” but I’m skeptical.

The opening of Swan’s essay:

Considering machines that think is a nice step forward in the AI debate as it departs from our own human-based concerns, and accords machines otherness in a productive way. It causes us to consider the other entity’s frame of reference. However, even more importantly this questioning suggests a large future possibility space for intelligence. There could be “classic” unenhanced humans, enhanced humans (with nootropics, wearables, brain-computer interfaces), neocortical simulations, uploaded mind files, corporations as digital abstractions, and many forms of generated AI: deep learning meshes, neural networks, machine learning clusters, blockchain-based distributed autonomous organizations, and empathic compassionate machines. We should consider the future world as one of multi-species intelligence.

What we call the human function of “thinking” could be quite different in the variety of possible future implementations of intelligence. The derivation of different species of machine intelligence will necessarily be different than that of humans•