Thanks very much for this post! Really valuable to see external people dig into these sorts of models and report what they find.
But these beliefs are hard to turn into precise yearly forecasts, and I think doing so will only cement overconfidence and leave people blindsided when reality turns out even weirder than you imagined.
I think people are going to deal with the fact that it’s really difficult to predict how a technology like AI is going to turn out. The massive blobs of uncertainty shown in AI 2027 are still severe underestimates of the uncertainty involved. If your plans for the future rely on prognostication, and this is the standard of work you are using, I think your plans are doomed. I would advise looking into plans that are robust to extreme uncertainty in how AI actually goes, and avoid actions that could blow up in your face if you turn out to be badly wrong.
Does this mean that you would overall agree with a recommendation to treat 2027 as a plausible year that superhuman coders might arrive, if accompanied with significant credence on other scenarios? It seems to me like extreme uncertainty should encompass “superhuman coders in 2027” (given how fast recent AI progress has been), and “not preparing for extremely fast AI progress” feels very salient to me as a sort of action that could blow up in your face if you turn out to be badly wrong.
FWIW, I would guess that the average effect of people engaging with AI 2027 is to expand the range of possible scenarios that people are imagining, such that they’re now able to imagine a few more highly weird scenarios in addition to some vague “business as usual” baseline assumption. By comparison, I would guess it’s a lot more rare for people to adopt high confidence that the AI 2027 scenario is correct. So by the lights of preventing overconfidence and the risk of getting blindsided, AI 2027 looks very valuable to me.
Thanks very much for this post! Really valuable to see external people dig into these sorts of models and report what they find.
Does this mean that you would overall agree with a recommendation to treat 2027 as a plausible year that superhuman coders might arrive, if accompanied with significant credence on other scenarios? It seems to me like extreme uncertainty should encompass “superhuman coders in 2027” (given how fast recent AI progress has been), and “not preparing for extremely fast AI progress” feels very salient to me as a sort of action that could blow up in your face if you turn out to be badly wrong.
FWIW, I would guess that the average effect of people engaging with AI 2027 is to expand the range of possible scenarios that people are imagining, such that they’re now able to imagine a few more highly weird scenarios in addition to some vague “business as usual” baseline assumption. By comparison, I would guess it’s a lot more rare for people to adopt high confidence that the AI 2027 scenario is correct. So by the lights of preventing overconfidence and the risk of getting blindsided, AI 2027 looks very valuable to me.