Why you should really care about artificial intelligence: We’re likely just a few decades away from creating a superintelligence. Why should you care? Because we’re on a path right now with just two outcomes: Extinction or immortality. AI is already taking over white collar jobs in Japan (buy-buy, insurance claim adjusters). Up next: Compliance officers, a function that is “ripe for automation because it is both rule-based and data-intensive,” the Harvard Business Review tells us. It’s a surprisingly short leap from there to an intelligence the likes of which our minds can barely imagine: “If our meager brains were able to invent wifi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 bn times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time—everything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us. Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth—all suddenly possible. Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth. As far as we’re concerned, if an ASI comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth—and the all-important question for us is: Will it be a nice God?”

If you’ve ever wondered why we’ve spent the last year going on and on about AI, but feel a bit behind, you need to read Wait But Why’s Tim Urban on “The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.” It’s a two-parter, but worth every minute you’ll spend reading it (and made easy to digest with simple illustrations, photos, graphs).