What does it mean when AI is smarter than all humans?

By Marie Haynes
5 min read

Table of Contents

Anthropic's Dario Amodei says we are only a few years away from a world where AI is better than humans at everything.

I have difficulty comprehending what this means for humanity.

Listen to this clip:

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(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snkOMOjiVOk)

He says:

"I don’t know exactly when it will come. I don’t know if it will be 2027, I think it’s plausible it could be longer than that. I don’t think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything and then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics."

Dario then goes on to say that when that comes we will need to have conversations about what that means for the economy and for humans to have meaning.

Will it actually happen? I think we will reach this point! I don't know what that means for humanity!

I recently wrote about a paper discussing the AI scientist, a system that does AI research, peer reviews its research, continually iterates and improves, refining its research output.

The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
The AI scientist proposed in this paper can generate research ideas, execute experiments, analyze results, write scientific papers and perform self peer review. This has profound implications for the progression of science!

Right now the world is fascinated with conversational LLM tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. What we don't spend much time talking about is that the incredible thing about AI is not that it can produce sentences, but rather, its ability to continually learn and improve.

AI can improve with human feedback that reinforces the good actions it takes (RLHF). Human quality raters judge responses and label them as good or bad. Then, the AI system can learn from these judgements and tweak its thinking patterns to produce more and more good results and fewer mistakes. It turns out that AI doesn't necessarily need humans in order to learn. A 2023 paper introduced Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback (RLAIF), saying that it can achieve performance that is on par with using human feedback.

AI will continue to learn and improve.

This learning isn't restricted to creating words and sentences.

MIT is developing liquid networks that learn and adapt to the real, physical world.

NVIDIA Cosmos is a world foundation model for physical AI that will be used in autonomous vehicles and robots.

Robots are learning new skills simply by watching videos.

NVIDIA goes beyond videos that can train robots by creating synthetic data that creates many, many variations of a video so that the robots can understand more and more scenarios.

When one robot or autonomous car makes a mistake, not only does it learn from that mistake, but ALL of the machines that are connected to that fleet learn and improve.

Not only will machines continue to improve, they will be able to reason about their environments and weigh the pros and cons of each choice they make. They will learn from these decisions as well.

There's no doubt that AI will continue to learn and be able to do more and more things that a human can do.

What does this mean for humans?

I am trying to grasp what my life would look like in a world where AI is better than me and can do so much.

I wake up from a great sleep. My personal AI learns from my body's biofeedback. It adjusts the temperature in my bedroom to be perfect. Perhaps a brain computer interface will trigger thinking patterns that deliver the optimal balance of neurotransmitters so that I continually feel joy and contentment.

Do I go to work? I mean, what would I do? I'm currently an SEO. I mean, will websites matter in the future? AI is already able to surf the web. In the future it will know exactly what can be improved for a business and while it might ask for human input, once we get our systems working well, we'll let AI run our businesses.

I've always said that as long as there are businesses that need customers, there will be some form of SEO. Perhaps I will build my own autonomous SEO agent that businesses will clamour for. That might do well for me for a while, but really, every business will have their own AI agents that will continue to learn. Eventually the businesses that are "found" online will be the ones that provide their customers with the absolute best experience and products.

Ah, products. Perhaps I will shift to creating something - growing food perhaps? Again, I expect we'll have robots that till the ground and optimize every aspect of food growth for us. They'll save the seeds of the best plants. They'll know exactly when to plant them and what medium to use because they have the entirety of the world's gardening knowledge in their systems and also are continually learning. They'll figure out how to grow exactly what we need in the space that each person has. They'll know which foods are best for our bodies as well. They'll learn how to protect our crops from the elements as well.

Will I make a physical product? I expect my AI system will encourage me to exercise. I'll need gym equipment, right? There will always be a need for manufacturing, right? Actually I'm not so sure. What happens when we combine AI with 3D printing? My AI systems will build me the equipment I need, customized for my body. There will be less and less need to buy things from manufacturers because we'll be able to make our own custom version of almost anything.

The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton was asked what career a young person should go into. His answer, "Learn plumbing." You'd think there would be great need for experienced tradespeople, right? But then again, my personal house robots will have everything ever known about plumbing in their brains. They'll have excellent vision capabilities and will be able to reason about how to fix any plumbing problem. I don't think plumbers will be needed.

Perhaps I will work on maintaining the robots? Uh...actually I think the robots can probably maintain the robots.

What the heck will we do?

Perhaps it will be like being retired, with all of our needs met. I've often said how much I envy my cat. All he does is sleep, relax, play and eat. Is this the life for us?

I honestly don't know!

Marie

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How was AI used in writing this post? I, Marie, a human, wrote all of this. However, I used Grok to help me find examples of how AI is being used in the physical world. The featured image was created with Gemini Advanced using Gemini 1.5 Pro with the prompt, "an image of a robot that is petting a human that is curled up like a cat."

Tagged in:

The Future, Agents

Last Update: January 22, 2025

About the Author

Marie Haynes

I love learning and sharing about AI. Formerly a veterinarian, in 2008, understanding Google search algorithms captivated me. In 2022 my focus shifted to understanding AI. AI is the future!

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