Existential Assurance: The Unseen Potential of Superintelligent AI
There’s a buzzword that’s been making its rounds lately. It pops up in almost every talk show, headlines countless articles, and invades our social media feeds.
“Existential Threat”
Those two words have almost become synonymous with Artificial Intelligence and superintelligence. But this is only one side of the coin.
There is another side of the argument that you aren’t being told.
Existential Assurance
Everyone and their grandmother seems to be prophesying doomsday scenarios. They picture a superintelligent AI run amok, unintentionally or otherwise, threatening our very existence. However, they’re turning a blind eye to an alternate reality that is just as plausible.
The idea of Existential Assurance is that a superintelligent AI (or many of them working together) would have the ability to save the collective “us” from problems that we are unable to solve by ourselves.
We will talk more about these problems shortly, but first why people keep perpetuating the myths of AI past.
Let’s look at the main example that has been used for decades.
