What Is Ineffable's Super Learner?

David Silver says a super learner has incredible capacity in depth and in breadth. Depth means a system that starts from not knowing anything and discovers things that go way beyond what humans know. People worked out languages, technology, science, and mathematics for themselves. Nobody handed down a blueprint, and nobody handed down a trillion element data set. He says nobody has cracked that in AI yet, and a system that keeps learning and discovering knowledge forever is the essence of super intelligence. Breadth means you can drop the learner into any stream of experience, a simulated world, a digital world, or a physical world, and it keeps learning.

Sonya Huang asks what first contact will feel like. David Silver says it will be amazing, an experience of wonderment, like encountering magic. The comparison he offers is narrower: superhuman play in Go. Go players who saw AlphaGo were amazed, and watching the play was a joyful experience. The same happened at superhuman play in chess, where the chess players were excited. He says going beyond board games, into new fields of science and new types of technology, will be incredible.