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superintelligences is likely to be competitive. Humans might be seen as minor annoyances, like ants at a picnic, but hybrid superintelligences—like corporations, organized religions, and nation states—could be existential threats. Like hybrid superintelligences, AIs might see humans mostly as useful tools to accomplish their goals, as pawns in their competition with the other superintelligences. Or we might simply be irrelevant. It is not impossible that a machine intelligence has already emerged and we simply do not recognize it as such. It may not wish to be noticed, or it may be so alien to us that we are incapable of perceiving it. This makes the self-interested AI scenario the most difficult to imagine. I believe the easy-to-imagine versions, like the humanoid intelligent robots of science fiction, are the least likely. Our most complex machines, like the Internet, have already grown beyond the detailed understanding of a single human, and their emergent behaviors may be well beyond our ken.
The final scenario is that machine intelligences will not be allied with one another but instead will work to further the goals of humanity as a whole. In this optimistic scenario, AI could help us restore the balance of power between the individual and the corporation, between the citizen and the state. It could help us solve the problems that have been created by hybrid superintelligences that subvert the goals of humans. In this scenario, AIs will empower us by giving us access to processing capacity and knowledge currently available only to corporations and states. In effect, they could become extensions of our individual intelligences, in furtherance of our human goals. They could make our weak individual intelligences strong. This prospect is both exciting and plausible. It is plausible because we have some choice in what we build, and we have a history of using technology to expand and augment our human capacities. As airplanes have given us wings and engines have given us muscles to move mountains, so our network of computers may amplify and extend our minds. We may not fully understand or control our destiny, but we have a chance to bend it in the direction of our values. The future is not something that will happen to us; it is something that we will build.

Why Wiener Saw What Others Missed

There is in electrical engineering a split which is known in Germany as the split between the technique of strong currents and the technique of weak currents, and which we know as the distinction between power and communication engineering. It is this split which separates the age just past from that in which we are now living.
—Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Cybernetics is the study of how the weak can control the strong. Consider the defining metaphor of the field: the helmsman guiding a ship with a tiller. The helmsman’s goal is to control the heading of the ship, to keep it on the right course. The information, the message that is sent to the helmsman, comes from the compass or the stars, and the helmsman closes the feedback loop by sending the steering messages through the gentle force of his hand on the tiller. In this picture, we see the ship tossing in powerful wind and waves in the real world, controlled by the communication system of messages in the world of information.
Yet the distinction between “real” and “information” is mostly a difference in perspective. The signals that carry messages, like the light of the stars and pressure of the

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