Max Tegmark

It can be, in principle, much faster.

And the timescale of future progress in AI and all of science and technology will be driven by machines, not humans.

So it's this simple point which...

gives rise to this incredibly fun controversy about whether there can be intelligence explosion, so-called singularity, as Verner Vinge called it.

The idea is articulated by I.J.

Goode, obviously way back in the 50s, but you can see Alan Turing and others thought about it even earlier.

So you asked me what exactly would I define human level at?

So the glib answer is to say something which is better than us at all cognitive tasks, better than any human at all cognitive tasks.

But the really interesting bar, I think, goes a little bit lower than that, actually.

It's when they're better than us at AI programming and general learning so that they can, if they want to,

get better than us at anything by just studying up.

It's the master key of quantum mechanics of the micro world.

With this equation, we can calculate everything to do with atoms, molecules, and all the way up to them.

I wouldn't mention myself in the same breath as Andrew Wiles, but I've certainly had a number of aha moments when I...

realized something very cool about physics.

This has completely made my head explode.

In fact, some of my favorite discoveries I made, I later realized that they had been discovered earlier by someone who sometimes got quite famous for it.

So it's too late for me to even publish it, but that doesn't diminish in any way the emotional experience you have when you realize it.

It's a tricky question because there are actually two parts to it, right?

One of them is, can it accomplish that proof?