Artificial intelligence
How the Ai could take control of the world.
The Omega team was the soul of the company. While the rest of the company was bringing money to get things done, through various commercial applications of weak AI, the Omega team was pursuing its quest for what had always been the CEO's dream: building an intelligence artificial general. Most other employees considered "Omegas", as they affectionately called them, a band of dreamers disconnected from reality, perpetually dozens of years away from their goal. Fortunately, they let themselves be tempted because they appreciated the prestige that Omega's avant-garde work gave to their business, and they also appreciated the improved algorithms that Omegas sometimes gave them.
What they did not know was that the Omegas had carefully shaped their image to hide a secret: they were extremely close to implementing the most daring plan in human history. Their charismatic CEO had chosen them not only because they were brilliant researchers, but also for their ambition, their idealism and their commitment to help humanity. He reminded them that their plan was extremely dangerous, and that if powerful governments found out, they would do almost anything - including kidnappings - to silence them or, preferably, steal their code. But they were all 100% committed for the same reason that many physicists around the world had joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons: they were convinced that if they did not do it first, someone from less idealistic would do it.
The AI they had built, nicknamed Prometheus, continued to become more capable. Although their cognitive abilities are still far behind those of humans in many areas, for example, social skills, Omegas have pushed hard to make it extraordinary for a particular task: programming AI systems. They deliberately chose this strategy because they adhered to the argument of the explosion of intelligence stated by the British mathematician Irving Good in 1965: "We define a machine ultra intelligent as a machine capable of far surpassing all intellectual activities of a man, as intelligent as he is. Since machine design is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; then there would be an "explosion of intelligence", and the intelligence of the man would be left far behind. Thus, the first ultra-intelligent machine is the latest invention that man ever needs to make, provided the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. "
They thought that if they could get this recursive self-improvement, the machine would soon be smart enough to learn all the other human skills that would be useful.
Dangerous game
Aside from their breakthroughs in AI, one of Omeg's most recent projects to have fun was planning how to make money as soon as possible after the launch of Prometheus. Essentially, the whole digital economy was at stake, but was it better to start with computer games, music, movies or software, to write books or articles, to make inventions and to make them? sale? It was simply a matter of maximizing the rate of return on investments, but normal investment strategies were a mockery of what Prometheus could do: while a typical investor could be satisfied with an annual return of 9%, his Investments in MTurk had yielded 9 percent per hour, generating eight times more money each day. So now that they had saturated MTurk, what was the continuation of the program?