In A Taxonomy of Minds I explore the varieties of intelligence which a greater-than-human intelligence might take. We could meet greater-than-human intelligences in an alien ET, or we can make synthetic ones. The one foundational assumption behind our making new minds ourselves is that we assume our mind is intelligent enough to make a new and different mind. Just because we are conscious does not mean we have the smarts to make consciousness ourselves. Whether (or when) AI is possible will ultimately depend on whether we are smart enough to make something smarter than ourselves. We assume that ants have not achieved this level. We also assume that as smart as chimpanzees are, chimps are not smart enough to make a mind smarter than a chimp, and so have not reached this threshold either. While some people assume humans can create a mind smarter than a human mind, humans may be at a level of intelligence that is below that threshold also. We simply don’t know where the threshold of bootstrapping intelligence is, nor where we are on this metric.
We can distinguish several categories of elementary minds in relation to bootstrapping:
1) A mind capable of imagining, or identifying a greater mind.
2) A mind capable of imaging but incapable of designing a greater mind.
3) A mind capable of designing a greater mind.
We fit the first criteria, but it is unclear whether we are of the second or third type of mind. There is also a fourth type, which follows the third:
4) A mind capable of generating a greater mind which in turn itself creates a greater mind, and so on.
This is an cascading, bootstrapping mind. Once a mind reaches this level, the recursive mind-enlargement can either keep going ad infinitum, or it might reach some limit. On the other hand, there may be more than one threshold in intelligence. Think of it as quantum levels. A mind may be able to make a mind smarter than itself, but the offspring mind may not be smart enough to make the next leap, and so gets stuck.
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