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Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened?

I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn\\u2019t everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions working on those problems, and people who are worried about them don\\u2019t feel the need to take their case directly to the public. The past ten years have seen AI goal alignment reach that level of maturity too. There are all sorts of new research labs, think tanks, and companies working on it \\u2013 the\\xa0Center For Human-Compatible AI\\xa0at UC Berkeley,\\xa0OpenAI,\\xa0Ought, the\\xa0Center For The Governance Of AI\\xa0at Oxford, the\\xa0Leverhulme Center For The Future Of Intelligence\\xa0at Cambridge, etc. Like every field, it could still use more funding and talent. But it\\u2019s at a point where academic respectability trades off against public awareness at a rate where webzine articles saying CARE ABOUT THIS OR YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE are less helpful.

One unhappy consequence of this happy state of affairs is that it\\u2019s harder to keep up with the field. In 2014, Nick Bostrom wrote\\xa0Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, giving a readable overview of what everyone was thinking up to that point. Since then, things have been less public-facing, less readable, and more likely to be published in dense papers with a lot of mathematical notation. They\\u2019ve also been \\u2013 no offense to everyone working on this \\u2013 less revolutionary and less interesting.

This is one reason I was glad to come across\\xa0Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services As General Intelligence\\xa0by Eric Drexler, a researcher who works alongside Bostrom at Oxford\\u2019s Future of Humanity Institute. This 200 page report is not quite as readable as\\xa0Superintelligence; its highly-structured outline form belies the fact that all of its claims start sounding the same after a while. But it\\u2019s five years more recent, and presents a very different vision of how future AI might look.