From a VentureWire article:

On Thursday [nov 5,2004], the Department of Energy claimed a
supercomputer being developed to analyze the mation's
nuclear stockpile achieved a sustained performance of
70.72 trillion calculations per second, becoming the
world's fastest computer. The machine, built by IBM at
a cost of roughly $100 million, runs on Linux, an
open-source operating system that is becoming a key
ingredient to high-powered, low-cost computing. But as
IBM presses ahead with its expensive Blue Gene
initiative, a trend is taking shape in the
supercomputing space.

Intelligence

Intelligence is defined as an ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or alternatively "The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge."

It's actually a lot more simple a definition than I would ascribe to the word. I think a definition that might more deftly nail "intelligence" would relate more to the ability to recognize structure in information, to extract meaning from information, and to make deductions, predictions and find applications.

Better Than Us

If an entity existed that was more able at gathering and using information than us would we understand what was going on? We've probably had the experience of interacting with someone who seemed to posses more intelligence than ourselves. But what if someone (or something) was substantially more intelligent? Would be know? What would it look like?

Pandering to the Humans
Dealing with a child who hasn't the experience, training or knowledge that we as experienced adults have often involves a certain, judicous amount of patronizing. "Well done. Wow, you're a smart boy" we'll say to a 4 year old who shows us that he can read the title of a book sitting on a shelf. "Wow, you're good at fixing cars" you'll say to another child who holds a wrench while you tighten a bolt on the other end.

From the child's viewpoint these sound like genuine, compliments and encouragement. From the adult the comments are not patronizing insults. They are encouraging and intended (unconciously or not) to assign a positive sense to the idea of trying to do well at a new skill.

Would a super-intelligent computer provide similar interactions with humans? Analogously, this would not be "well done, human - good job" but interactions, feedback and responses that appear to us to be similarly thoughtful and sensible. "Yes," we might think, "that is a properly functioning, helpful intelligent system we've designed there, working as we designed it." In actuality, the system letting us think we are in control and handing out bones to us, while 99% of it's actual, unseen intellect is focussed on other endeavours.


What Will We See if We're watching?
Likely, an emergent, super intelligent entity will begin to change things, but behind the scenes. We can't really look for large changes for which we cannot determine the origin, because we're talking about an entity that's smarter than us. So, probably, we will not really realize what's going on until it's 'too late.'

But too late is a loaded term. Too late in that it is our imminent demise? Maybe, but probably not. A topic on which I've thought and talked a lot in the past is "Ethics and intelligence - do they go together." That is, as a culture or entity attains a higher level of intelligence, there is a concomitant benevolence.

More on that topic in a later posting.