superintelligence

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Etymology tree
Proto-Indo-European *úp
Proto-Indo-European *-er
Proto-Indo-European *upér
Proto-Italic *super
Latin super
Latin super-lbor.
English super-
Proto-Indo-European *h₁én
Proto-Indo-European *-tér
Proto-Indo-European *h₁n̥tér
Proto-Italic *n̥ter
Latin inter
Latin inter-
Proto-Indo-European *leǵ-
Proto-Indo-European *-eti
Proto-Indo-European *léǵeti
Proto-Italic *legō
Latin legō?
Proto-Indo-European *h₂leg-
Proto-Indo-European *-eti
Proto-Indo-European *h₂légeti
Proto-Italic *legō?
Latin intellegō
Proto-Indo-European *-onts
Latin -ns
Latin intellegēns
Proto-Indo-European *-is
Proto-Indo-European *-(i)yós
Proto-Italic *-ijos
Proto-Italic *-ios
Old Latin -ios
Latin -iusnom.
▲
Ancient Greek -ίᾱ (-íā)influ.
Latin -ia
Latin intellegentia
Old French intelligencebor.
Middle English intelligence
English intelligence
English superintelligence

    From super- + intelligence.

    Pronunciation

    • Audio (US):(file)

    Noun

    superintelligence (countable and uncountable, plural superintelligences)

    1. Intelligence far above normal human intelligence.
      Synonyms: hyperintelligence, ultraintelligence
      • 1905 December 20, The Bendigo Independent, Victoria, page 4, column 2:
        It means pretence, vulgarity, assumption, and the highest altitude of the ridiculous; also gilded ignorance, mock patriotism, wire-pulling, successful knavery. It also claims "super-intelligence, and all the cardinal virtues." There you have the foreign trade party and their missions.
      • 1914 February 21, The Truth, Perth, page 8, column 2:
        Seeing that the white man, poor wretch, according to that dictum (in very extreme probability) has no rightful claim to any country; for when super-intelligence through evolution (the power that drew the colour lines for a good, wise, and sufficient purpose, notwithstanding that some men presume to know better than the All-Wise) produced the white man because of the inability of any coloured man TO FULFIL MAN'S DESTINY, all parts of the earth were already occupied by the earlier colored man.
      • 1935 September 26, Barrington Beverley, “The Space Raiders”, in The Labor Daily, Sydney, page 9, column 1:
        It might be possible that super-intelligence from another planet had invented a craft able to move at such a volition.
      • 1935 October 15, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, page 7, column 6:
        "What will win the Melbourne Cup?" Mr. George Robot was asked yesterday afternoon. "I don't know," said Mr. Robot, without any hesitation. After such a display of super-intelligence, it was a pleasure to converse with him.
    2. (futurology, artificial intelligence) Machine intelligence completely surpassing human intellect in all domains, incorporating vastly superior reasoning, processing speed, and memory.
      • 2015, Murray Shanahan, The Technological Singularity, MIT Press, →ISBN, pages 90–91:
        The lesson of this little story is that if and when human-level AI is achieved, superintelligence will soon follow. […] What we have in this story seems to be a form of collective superintelligence. Because it is superintelligent, we probably can't control it.
      • 2019, Susan Schneider, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Princeton University Press, pages 4-5:
        With self-improvement algorithms, and with rapid computations, it could quickly discover ways to become vastly smarter than us, becoming a superintelligence—that is, and AI that outthinks us in every domain.
      • 2025 June 13, Cade Metz, “Meta Is Building a Superintelligence Lab. What Is That?”, in The New York Times‎[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 4 November 2025:
        On Thursday, Meta unveiled a $14.3 billion investment and partnership that will be the core of a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to the pursuit of “superintelligence,” a swing-for-the-fences effort in the global technology race. […] Silicon Valley leaders are now talking about building superintelligence, which would be even more powerful than A.G.I. It, too, is a loosely defined term, but generally refers to a machine that is more powerful than the human brain.
      • 2025 September 3, Gary Marcus, “The Fever Dream of Imminent Superintelligence Is Finally Breaking”, in The New York Times‎[2], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 20 February 2026:
        Fundamentally, people like Mr. Altman, the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and countless other tech leaders and investors had put far too much faith into a speculative and unproven hypothesis called scaling: the idea that training A.I. models on ever more data and using ever more hardware would eventually lead to A.G.I. or even a superintelligence that surpasses humans.
      • 2026 October 10, Madhumita Murgia, “Lunch with the FT: David Silver”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 3:
        But then what, he [David Silver] asks, are the conditions under which superintelligence coexists peacefully with us—and when does it go wrong? His goal is to scientifically design machines to be “co-operative, helpful and supportive of human flourishing”—something that he says is mostly “guesswork” today.

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