5 October 2026 · 2 min read
What we mean by superintelligence
Three different things hide behind one word: thinking faster, thinking together, and thinking better. Only the third is new.
The word gets used for anything impressive a computer does. That makes it useless. A working definition is narrower: a superintelligence is a system whose cognitive performance greatly exceeds the best humans in virtually every domain that matters, including science, strategy and social skill. The definition comes from the philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 book gave the field its vocabulary.
Superhuman is not the same thing
Machines have been superhuman at single tasks for a long time. A pocket calculator beats any person at arithmetic. Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997. AlphaGo beat one of the strongest Go players in 2016. None of these systems could do anything outside its task. They are narrow, and narrow superhuman ability does not add up to general ability on its own.
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, names the middle step: a system that can do roughly what a capable person can do across most intellectual work. Superintelligence starts where AGI stops. The difference is one of degree, and the degree is what changes the consequences.
Three ways to be smarter
Bostrom separates three forms, and the split is still the clearest tool for thinking about the subject.
- Speed. A mind like ours that runs much faster. A week of expert work in an hour. Nothing about the reasoning is alien; there is simply more of it per day.
- Collective. Many capable minds working together with better coordination than any human organisation. Copies that share what they learn instantly and never forget to pass on a result.
- Quality. A mind that reasons in ways people cannot, the way people reason in ways other primates cannot. This is the form with no precedent, and the hardest one to predict or to test for.
The first two can be built from parts we already understand: faster hardware and more copies. That is why serious forecasters treat them as engineering questions. The third is an open scientific question.
Why the definition matters
Each form calls for a different response. Speed and scale can be metered, rate-limited and priced. Quality cannot be supervised by someone who does not follow the reasoning, so it puts the weight on interpretability and on evaluations designed in advance. A policy or a product plan that says "superintelligence" without saying which form is planning for a word.
Further reading: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014). See Resources.