Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
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Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#2Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome.
To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#3> If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view, I suppose), but 50% by 2047 seems low to me. That just feels like an eternity of development, and even if we maintain the current pace (let alone see it accelerate as AI contributes more to its own development), it's difficult for me to imagine what humans will still be better able to do than AI in over a decade.
I do wonder if the question is ambiguously phrased and some people interpreted it as pure AI (i.e. just bits) while others answered it with the assumption that you'd also have to have the sort of bipedal robot enabled with AI that would allow it to take on all the manual tasks humans do.
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#4Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?
A climate forcing has a physical effect on the Earth system that you can model with primitive equations. It is not a social or economic problem (although removing the forcing is).
You might as well roll a ball down an incline and then ask me whether Keynes was right.
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#5> If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. Maybe I'm overly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view, I suppose), but 50% by 2047 seems low to me. That just feels like an eternity of development, and even if we maintain the current pace (let alone see it accelerate as AI contributes mor…
Yeah, it really comes down to the question of how we advance on just-bits vs constrained-environment robotics vs open-domain robotics...
Some interesting work here on using LLMs to improve on open-domain robotics: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/embod...
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#6> If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. Maybe I'm overly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view, I suppose), but 50% by 2047 seems low to me. That just feels like an eternity of development, and even if we maintain the current pace (let alone see it accelerate as AI contributes mor…
What is the "current pace". Last year? Last 5 years? Last 20 years?
If you mean the last year, is that pace maintainable?
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#7Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?
We have extremely detailed and well-tested models of climate. It's worth reading the IPCC report - it's extremely interesting, and quite accessible. I was somewhat skeptical of climate work before I began reading, but I spent hundreds of hours understanding it, and was quite impressed by the depth of the work. By contrast, our models of future AI are very weak. Something like the scaling laws paper or the Chinchilla paper are far less convincing than the best climate work. And arguments like those in Nick Bostrom or Stuart Russell's books are much more conjectural and qualitative (& less well-tested) than the climate argument
I say this as someone who written several pieces about xrisk from AI, and who is concerned. The models and reasoning are simply not nearly as detailed or well-tested as in the case of climate.
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#8> If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. Maybe I'm overly optimistic (or pessimistic depending on your point of view, I suppose), but 50% by 2047 seems low to me. That just feels like an eternity of development, and even if we maintain the current pace (let alone see it accelerate as AI contributes mor…
If you gave print outs of discussions with GPT-4 to AI researchers 5 years ago, they would have told you conversation like that is 10 or 20 years out.
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#9Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?
Because the AI human extinction idea is entirely conjecture while climate change is just a progression on current models.
What’s the progression that leads to AI human extinction ?
Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
#10Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?
Profit motive