Superintelligence and Superheroes
On September 29 the White House issued Executive Order 14434, titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.” I read it, because I don’t rely exclusively on media coverage. It directs the executive branch to say “Super Intelligence” instead of “Artificial Intelligence,” and its closing section states that it creates no right or benefit enforceable at law by any party.
That is the order. Renaming the power says nothing about the responsibility, and the responsibility is the only part that was ever heroic.
I wrote an essay about why that distinction is older than any of us, and why it keeps arriving at the same answer from completely unrelated directions: the Code of Hammurabi, Plato’s Republic, a ten cent comic book in 1962, the physicists who asked to be bound after they built the bomb, and the engineers who put their objection in writing the night before Challenger launched.
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