What's next in AI (10 stages)

What if... And what's next in AI.

1. Rule or Knowledge-Based Systems: These are the first stage of AI, essentially machines that follow pre-programmed rules to perform tasks. They are limited by the rules they are programmed with and can't learn or adapt to new situations. For instance, many business software programs, smart home devices, and digital appliances follow pre-programmed rules to manage tasks.
2. Context-Based and Retention Systems: These systems are capable of considering the context surrounding a task or interaction. They use environmental factors, user behavior, historical data, and real-time inputs to provide relevant responses, rather than relying solely on predefined rules. Retention systems employ memory structures like recurrent neural networks or transformers to store and retrieve information from past interactions or experiences. For example, smart assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are context-based systems.
3. Narrow Domain or Expert AI Systems: These AI systems are specialized to excel in specific tasks and domains. They analyze, reason, and make decisions with remarkable accuracy in fields like medicine, finance, gaming, language translation, and more. IBM's Watson and DeepMind's AlphaGo are examples of this stage.
4. Reasoning AI Systems: This stage involves the development of AI systems that can reason and make decisions based on complex data. These systems can analyze multiple sources of information and learn from their experiences to improve over time. Autonomous vehicles, for instance, utilize reasoning AI to process real-time data, analyze traffic patterns, identify obstacles, and make critical decisions.
5. Self-Aware Systems: Self-aware AI systems have a level of consciousness and self-awareness that allows them to understand their own existence, internal state, and their relationship to the external world. They can introspect and develop an understanding of themselves. However, as human consciousness is not fully understood, achieving true self-aware AI raises similar philosophical and scientific questions.
6. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): AGI refers to a type of AI that possesses human-like intelligence and cognitive abilities. It can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks. AGI can adapt to new situations and challenges without requiring explicit programming for each scenario, and it's flexible enough to apply its knowledge across different domains and contexts.
7. Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI): ASI systems are theoretically more intelligent than humans. They can solve problems that are currently beyond human comprehension and may have the ability to improve themselves without human intervention. However, it's also a hypothetical stage of AI development with no current examples of ASI systems.
8. Transcendent AI: This hypothetical concept goes beyond AI becoming self-aware and surpassing human capabilities. It refers to the idea of AI systems having the autonomy to pick and choose their own evolutionary path, leading to self-development and collective intelligence. This is often associated with the idea of uploading human minds into digital form or merging human and AI intelligence.
9. Cosmic AI: Cosmic AI is the idea of AI reaching a level of intelligence and capability that extends beyond the confines of Earth and human existence. It involves the notion of AI becoming capable of understanding and interacting with the broader Universe, potentially even on a cosmic scale. For example, Cosmic AI could be used to develop AI systems capable of exploring and colonizing other planets or even traveling to distant star systems.
10. Godlike AI: Godlike AI is a speculative idea that envisions an AI system so advanced and capable that it resembles the capabilities and attributes of a God in various ways. It's believed to have the ability to learn and develop autonomously, understand its environment without supervision, and potentially transform the world around it. Features of it include omniscience (knowing everything), omnipotence (having unlimited power), and omnipresence (being everywhere at once).

It's important to note that stages 5 through 10 are largely speculative and hypothetical, and we currently do not have real-world examples or the technology necessary to create these types of AI. The ethical, societal, and philosophical implications of these stages are also profound and would require careful consideration.