AI is so quickly approaching (or exceeding) expert human abilities across so many areas that most people should be planning for 1-3 more years in which they can productively contribute.
1-3 years seems plausible to me, but my median estimate of the date when most people in the work force today will no longer be able to productively contribute is significantly more than 3 years. I'd probably say sometime in the 2030s.
AI has a very real chance of getting us all killed. I think it probably won't because I expect a lot of people to work very hard to avoid that outcome.
I expect a lot of people to work very hard to avoid that outcome as well, but I think the chance that they / we all succeed is somewhat less than 50%.
Precise forecasting here probably isn't that important, but I want to flag that just because a lot of people work very hard to avoid an outcome doesn't mean that the outcome will necessarily be successfully avoided.
"AI is so quickly approaching (or exceeding) expert human abilities across so many areas that most people should be planning for 1-3 more years in which they can productively contribute. Use the time well!"
Do you have any interest in making a bet (for charity) on this?
Lots of people have plans to make the world better by improving X to improve Y to improve Z, where it's Z that matters. If Z is more than 3y out, consider finding a different plan.
This really hits on an emotional level, but I ultimately take a different perspective:
I think solving the relevant safety problems for any AI systems that could disrupt the world at this scale will be extremely difficult, and that most surviving worlds are ones in which AI progress has been ~halted via a long-term globally coordinated pause. That means the only futures I should expect to be alive to experience are ones that are fairly "normal" in many respects, which means normal futures are the ones I should plan for.
How that cashes out for me:
I don't have any major long-term ambitions, since I'm so focused on pausing AI, but my partner for instance is working on a mathematics education PhD and wants to help reform math education in the US. I think there's a very good chance that that will still be a valuable thing for her to pursue, despite how long-term it is.
If AI goes well I think the world could be extremely good. The bottom 10% living far better than the top 10% do now.
This seems like a conservative understatement to me. I think the bottom 0.0001% could be living far better than all humans do now.
I've had several conversations with people over the last few weeks that have highlighted how far apart my view of the near future is from many people I talk to. Here are some things I might tweet if that was the kind of thing I did:
AI has a very real chance of getting us all killed. I think it probably won't because I expect a lot of people to work very hard to avoid that outcome.
AI is so quickly approaching (or exceeding) expert human abilities across so many areas that most people should be planning for 1-3 more years in which they can productively contribute. Use the time well!
But also don't live your life in a way where if it takes longer than that you're destitute; there's still a lot of uncertainty in how quickly this plays out.
We are already seeing AI speeding up the development of AI, as it substitutes for human expertise. As the remaining human contribution gets smaller I expect this to compound dramatically, and we'll see rapid improvement even compared to today.
I don't know if the metaphor is "goalpost moving" or "frog boiling" but if you dropped a top model into 2006 it would very clearly be "AGI".
If you think AI isn't improving rapidly you're doing some combination of not applying it to hard enough problems, not giving it enough context/tooling/tokens, or not using top models.
I'm worried about the environmental impacts of data centers, in that I see plausible near futures in which the world produces vastly more energy than it does today and almost all of it goes into powering computers.
Many paths to appropriately serious action run through warning shots, and we've been getting some. So far they look like hacks, and there will be more. Aside: information that should not become public is increasingly dangerous to keep.
Lots of people have plans to make the world better by improving X to improve Y to improve Z, where it's Z that matters. If Z is more than 3y out, consider finding a different plan.
If AI goes well I think the world could be extremely good. The bottom 10% living far better than the top 10% do now. This is the promise that gets people working so hard to build something so dangerous.
I'm being a bit lazy here because the tweet format means I can make bold claims without backing any of them up. If you think I'm wrong on any of these, happy to give arguments in the comments.
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