I think most of your disagreements on this list would not change. However, I think if you conditioned on 50% chance of singularity by 2030 instead of 15%, you’d update towards faster takeoff, less government/societal competence (and thus things more likely to fail at an earlier, less dignified point), more unipolar/local takeoff, lower effectiveness of coordination/policy/politics-style strategies, less interpretability and other useful alignment progress, less chance of really useful warning shots… and of course, significantly higher p(doom).
To put it another way, when I imagine what (I think) your median future looks like, it’s got humans still in control in 2035, sitting on top of giant bureaucracies of really cheap, really smart proto-AGIs that fortunately aren’t good enough at certain key skills (like learning-to-learn, or concept formation, or long-horizon goal-directedness) to be an existential threat yet, but are definitely really impressive in a bunch of ways and are reshaping the world economy and political landscape and causing various minor disasters here and there that serve as warning shots. So the whole human world is super interested in AI stuff and policymakers are all caught up on the arguments for AI risk and generally risks are taken seriously instead of dismissed as sci-fi and there are probably international treaties and stuff and also meanwhile the field of technical alignment has had 13 more years to blossom and probably lots of progress has been made on interpretability and ELK and whatnot and there are 10x more genius researchers in the field with 5+ years of experience already… and even in this world, singularity is still 5+ years away, and probably there are lots of expert forecasters looking at awesome datasets of trends on well-designed benchmarks predicting with some confidence when it will happen and what it’ll look like.
This world seems pretty good to me, it’s one where there is definitely still lots of danger but I feel like >50% chance things will be OK. Alas it’s not the world I expect, because I think probably things will happen sooner and go more quickly than that, with less time for the world to adapt and prepare.
I’m guessing ~15% on singularity by 2030 and ~40% on singularity by 2040
These figures surprise me, I thought that you believed in shorter timelines because from Agreements #8 in your post where you said “[Transformative AI] is more likely to be years than decades, and there’s a real chance that it’s months”, .
~40% by 2040 sounds like an expectation of transformative AI probably taking decades. (Unless I’m drawing a false equivalence between transformative AI and what you mean by “singularity”.)
In agreement #8 I’m talking about the time from “large impact on the world” (say increasing GDP by 10%, automating a significant fraction of knowledge work, “feeling like TAI is near,” something like that) to “transformative impact on the world” (say singularity, or 1-2 year doubling times, something like that). I think right now the impact of AI on the world is very small compared to this standard.
I think my take is roughly “What Paul would think if he had significantly shorter timelines.”
Do you think that some of my disagreements should change if I had shorter timelines?
(As mentioned last time we talked, but readers might not have seen: I’m guessing ~15% on singularity by 2030 and ~40% on singularity by 2040.)
I think most of your disagreements on this list would not change.
However, I think if you conditioned on 50% chance of singularity by 2030 instead of 15%, you’d update towards faster takeoff, less government/societal competence (and thus things more likely to fail at an earlier, less dignified point), more unipolar/local takeoff, lower effectiveness of coordination/policy/politics-style strategies, less interpretability and other useful alignment progress, less chance of really useful warning shots… and of course, significantly higher p(doom).
To put it another way, when I imagine what (I think) your median future looks like, it’s got humans still in control in 2035, sitting on top of giant bureaucracies of really cheap, really smart proto-AGIs that fortunately aren’t good enough at certain key skills (like learning-to-learn, or concept formation, or long-horizon goal-directedness) to be an existential threat yet, but are definitely really impressive in a bunch of ways and are reshaping the world economy and political landscape and causing various minor disasters here and there that serve as warning shots. So the whole human world is super interested in AI stuff and policymakers are all caught up on the arguments for AI risk and generally risks are taken seriously instead of dismissed as sci-fi and there are probably international treaties and stuff and also meanwhile the field of technical alignment has had 13 more years to blossom and probably lots of progress has been made on interpretability and ELK and whatnot and there are 10x more genius researchers in the field with 5+ years of experience already… and even in this world, singularity is still 5+ years away, and probably there are lots of expert forecasters looking at awesome datasets of trends on well-designed benchmarks predicting with some confidence when it will happen and what it’ll look like.
This world seems pretty good to me, it’s one where there is definitely still lots of danger but I feel like >50% chance things will be OK. Alas it’s not the world I expect, because I think probably things will happen sooner and go more quickly than that, with less time for the world to adapt and prepare.
I personally found this to be a very helpful comment for visualizing how things could go.
These figures surprise me, I thought that you believed in shorter timelines because from Agreements #8 in your post where you said “[Transformative AI] is more likely to be years than decades, and there’s a real chance that it’s months”, .
~40% by 2040 sounds like an expectation of transformative AI probably taking decades. (Unless I’m drawing a false equivalence between transformative AI and what you mean by “singularity”.)
In agreement #8 I’m talking about the time from “large impact on the world” (say increasing GDP by 10%, automating a significant fraction of knowledge work, “feeling like TAI is near,” something like that) to “transformative impact on the world” (say singularity, or 1-2 year doubling times, something like that). I think right now the impact of AI on the world is very small compared to this standard.
Thanks, that makes it more clear to me the two different periods of time you’re talking about.