Unlocking the Future: How Advanced AI and Automated Engineering Will Shape Our World

Advanced AI systems seem possible and inevitable, but what effect will they have? No one can answer this in full, but one effect of automated engineering is clear: it will speed our advance toward the limits of the possible. To understand our prospects, we need some idea of how fast advanced AI systems will think. Modern computers have only a tiny fraction of the brain’s complexity, yet they can already run programs imitating significant aspects of human behavior. They differ totally from the brain in their basic style of operation, though, so direct physical comparison is almost useless. The brain does a huge number of things at once, but fairly slowly; most modern computers do only one thing at a time, but with blinding speed.

Still, one can imagine AI hardware built to imitate a brain not only in function but in structure. This might result from a neural-simulation approach, or from the evolution of AI programs to run on hardware with a brainlike style of organization. Either way, we can use analogies with the human brain to estimate a minimum speed for advanced assembler-built AI systems. Neural synapses respond to signals in thousandths of a second; experimental electronic switches respond a hundred million times faster (and nanoelectronic switches will be faster yet). Neural signals travel at…