[hharrison]

Eventually, but strong AI just means intelligence matching or exceeding human intelligence. We already have billions of entities with human intelligence, and it is taking us a long time to produce something smarter than ourselves. If the first strong AI is just a little smarter than us, and if it chooses to put its energy toward the creation of more AIs, then maybe it will eventually produce something smarter than itself. But it's not so simple that we just get to the singularity straight away.

[seiji]

The problem with people is multiplicative intelligence parity. (Like that phrase? Feel free to use it as your own.)

You can find one smart person. But how do you find another smart person for them to work with? With AI-level smarts, you reduce the coordination problem to zero since it can spawn multiple copies of its own brain state (maybe?) and work concurrently and intelligently on the same problem. Just ignore the problem of killing off divergent brain states once the task is complete (nobody cares about the life of a kage bunshin).

I sure could get a lot more done if I had five more of me (unpaid, of course) to tackle a problem all at once.