By a "superintelligence" we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the
             best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity,
             general wisdom and social skills. This definition leaves open how the
             superintelligence is implemented: it could be a digital computer, an
             ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue or what have
             you. It also leaves open whether the superintelligence is conscious and has
             Entities such as companies or the scientific community are not
             superintelligences according to this definition. Although they can perform a
             number of tasks of which no individual human is capable, they are not
             intellects and there are many fields in which they perform much worse than
             a human brain - for example, you can't have real-time conversation with
             Superintelligence requires software as well as hardware. There are several
             approaches to the software problem, varying in the amount of top-down
             direction they require. At the one extreme we have systems like CYC which
             is a very large encyclopedia-like knowledge-base and inference-engine. It
             has been spoon-fed facts, rules of thumb and heuristics for over a decade by
             a team of human knowledge enterers. While systems like CYC might be
             good for certain practical tasks, this hardly seems like an approach that will
             convince AI-skeptics that superintelligence might well happen in the
             foreseeable future. We have to look at paradigms that require less human
             input, ones that make more use of bottom-up methods.
             Given sufficient hardware and the right sort of programming, we could
             make the machines learn in the same way a child does, i.e. by interacting
             with human adults and other objects in the environment. The learning
             me...