[Question] What will the twenties look like if AGI is 30 years away?

I’m especially interested to hear from people with long (i.e. 20+ year) timelines what they think the next 10 years will look like.

[EDIT: After pushback from Richard Ngo, I’ve agreed to stop talking about short and long timelines and just use numbers instead, e.g. “20+ year” and “<10 year” timelines. I recommend everyone do the same going forward.]

Ajeya (as of the time of her report at least) is such a person, and she gave some partial answers already:

By 2025, I think we could easily have decent AI personal assistants that autonomously compose emails and handle scheduling and routine shopping based on users’ desires, great AI copy-editors who help a lot with grammar and phrasing and even a little bit with argument construction or correctness, AIs who summarize bodies of information like conversations in meetings or textbooks and novels, AI customer service reps and telemarketers, great AI medical diagnosis, okay AI counseling/​therapy, AI coding assistants who write simple code for humans and catch lots of subtle bugs not catchable by compilers /​ type checkers, even better AI assisted search that feels like asking a human research assistant to find relevant information for you, pretty good AI tutors, AIs that handle elements of logistics and route planning, AIs that increasingly handle short-timescale trading at hedge funds, AIs that help find good hyperparameter settings and temperature settings for training and sampling from other AIs, and so on.

But she thinks it’ll probably take till around 2050 for us to get transformative AI, and (I think?) AGI as well.

The hypothesis I’m testing here is that people with long timelines [EDIT: 20+ year timelines] nevertheless think that there’ll be lots of crazy exciting AI progress in the twenties, just nothing super dangerous or transformative. I’d like to get a clearer sense of how many people agree and what they think that progress will look like.

(This question is a complement to Bjartur’s previous question)