However, the first genuine AI will not be birthed in a stand-alone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion computer chips known as the net. It will be planetary in dimensions, but thin, embedded, and loosely connected. Any device that touches this networked AI will share–and contribute to–its intelligence. A lonely off-the-grid AI cannot learn as fast, or as smartly, as one that is plugged into eight billion human minds, plus quintillions of online transistors, plus hundreds of exabytes of real-life data, plus the self-correcting feedback loops of the entire civilization. So the network itself will cognify into something that uncannily keeps getting better.
When this emerging AI arrives, is very ubiquity will hide it. We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, but it will be faceless, unseen. We will be able to reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online), it will be difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?