How to be the Superintelligence You’ve Been Waiting For

We alternately dread, worship and dismiss the arrival of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). Yet the real superintelligences already surround us: religions, corporations, markets and democracies. This talk will welcome us to imagine not how we can build ASI that defeats us in all things, but instead how we can, together with our environment and machines, become a collectively self-aware global superintelligence.

Using economic theory as a translational formalism, E. Glen Weyl will illustrate how we can build core sociological ideas like community into algorithmic design and transform focal technical structures like neural networks into the design of social institutions. By transcending the misleading divide between social and technical systems, such joint engineering suggests a path away from both fear of ASI domination and its disappointing real-world performance.