If Sam believes the merge has already begun, then his, Musk’s, and other’s predictions about superhuman AI are really just describing a rather boring fact about the world.

His examples of the merge in progress are social media determining how we feel and search engines deciding what we think. The problem here is the anthropomorphizing that humans have done throughout history to understand things they can’t fully explain. Gods don’t get angry and cause rain and search engines don’t make decisions about what we think. A search engine is just a complex math formula that can’t make a decision anymore than a calculator “decides” to output 4 when someone types 2 + 2.

Bostrom and others in this camp always have a hard time describing what “superhuman” will look like or mean. But I will guess in 2075 that the goal posts will be moved and it will be said that in 2017 we hadn’t realized that there was already superhuman AI, as evidenced by calculators that could already do math faster than a human.