Ben Pace, the Vacationing Vagabond comments on Forecasting Thread: AI Timelines

[Ben Pace, the Vacationing Vagabond]

For example, a main consideration of my prediction is using the heurastic With 50% probability, things will last twice as long as they already have, with the starting time of 1956, the time of the Dartmouth College summer AI conference.

A counter hypothesis I’ve heard (not original to me) is: With 50% probability, we will be half-way through the AI researcher-years required to get AGI.

I think this suggests much shorter timelines, as most researchers have been doing research in the last ~10 years.

It’s not clear to me what reference class makes sense here though. Like, I feel like 50% doesn’t make any sense. It implies that for all outstanding AI problems we’re fifty percent there. We’re 50% of the way to a rat brain, to a human emulation, to a vastly superintelligent AGI, etc. It’s not a clearly natural category for a field to be “done”, and it’s not clear which thing counts as ”done” in this particular field.

[gwern]

I was looking at the NIPS growth numbers last June and I made a joke:

AI researcher anthropics: ‘researchers [should] tend to think AI is ~20 years away because given exponential growth of researchers & careers of ~30 years, the final generation of researchers will make up a majority of all researchers, hence, by SSA+Outside View, one must assume 20 years.’

(Of course, I’m making a rather carbon-chauvinistic assumption here that it’s only human researchers/​researcher-years which matter.)