Max Tegmark

So intelligence, by its very nature, isn't something you can measure by just one number, some overall goodness.

No, no.

There are some people who are better at this, some people are better at that.

Right now we have machines that are much better than us at some very narrow tasks,

Multiplying large numbers fast, memorizing large databases, playing chess, playing Go, and soon driving cars.

But there's still no machine that can match a human child in general intelligence.

But artificial general intelligence, AGI, the name of your course, of course, that is...

By its very definition, the quest to build a machine that can do everything as well as we can.

So the old holy grail of AI from back to its inception in the 60s.

If that ever happens, of course, I think it's going to be the biggest transition in the history of life on earth.

But it doesn't necessarily have to wait the big impact until machines are better than us at knitting.

The really big change...

It doesn't come exactly at the moment they're better than us at everything.

The really big change comes... First, there are big changes when they start becoming better at us at doing most of the jobs that we do, because that takes away much of the demand for human labor.

And then the really whopping change comes when they become better than us at AI research.

Because right now, the timescale of AI research is...

limited by the human research and development cycle of years, typically.

How long does it take from one release of some software or iPhone or whatever to the next?

But once Google can replace 40,000 engineers by 40,000 equivalent engineers,

pieces of software or whatever, but then there's no reason that has to be years.