# Afterword

*Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence — K. Eric Drexler, FHI Technical Report #2019-1 (Markdown edition). Front/back matter. Rendered PDF: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9c05427a-6390-4b42-9c55-ee45f73a26ad*

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While this document was being written, AI researchers have, as the R&D-automation/AI-services model would predict, continued to automate research and development processes while developing systems that apply increasingly general learning capabilities to an increasing range of tasks in bounded domains. Progress along these lines continues to exceed my expectations in surprising ways, particularly in the automation of architecture search and training.

The central concepts presented in this document are intended to be what Chip Morningstar calls “the second kind of obvious”—obvious once pointed out, which is to say, obvious in light of facts that are already well-known. Based on the reception in the AI research community to date, this effort seems to have largely succeeded.

Looking forward, I hope to see the comprehensive AI-services model of general, superintelligent-level AI merge into the background of assumptions that shape thinking about the trajectory of AI technology. Whatever one’s expectations may be regarding the eventual development of advanced, increasingly general AI agents, we should expect to see diverse, increasingly general superintelligent-level services as their predecessors and as components of a competitive world context. This is, I think, a robust conclusion that reframes many concerns.