If artificial intelligence was about to become ‘human-level’, do you think we (society) would get advance notice? Would artificial intelligence researchers have been talking about it for years? Would tell-tale precursor technologies have triggered the alert? Would it be completely unsurprising, because AI’s had been able to do almost everything that humans could do for a decade, and catching up at a steady pace?
Whether we would be surprised then seems to make a big difference to what we should do now. Suppose that there are things someone should do before human-level AI appears (a premise to most current efforts to mitigate AI impacts). If there will be a period in which many people anticipate human-level AI soon, then probably someone will do the highest priority things. If you try to do them now, you might replace them or just fail because it is hard to see what needs doing so far ahead of time. So if you think AI will not be surprising, then the best things to do regarding AI now will tend to be the high value things which require a longer lead time. This might include building better institutions and capabilities; shifting AI research trajectories; doing technical work that is hard to parallelize; or looking for ways to get the clear warning earlier.
Anders Sandberg has put some thought into warning signs for AI.
On the other hand, if the advent of human-level AI was very surprising, then only a small group of people will ever respond to the anticipation of human-level AI (including those who are already concerned about it). This makes it more likely that a person who anticipates human-level AI now – as a member of that small group – should work on the highest priority things that will need to be done about it ever. This might include object-level tools for controlling moderately powerful intelligences, or design of features that would lower any risks of those intelligences.
I have just argued that the best approach for dealing with concerns about human-level AI should be depend on how surprising we expect it to be. I also think there are relatively cheap ways to shed light on this question that (as far as I know) haven’t received much attention. For instance one could investigate:
- How well can practitioners in related areas usually predict upcoming developments? (especially for large developments, and for closely related fields)
- To what extent is progress in AI driven by conceptual progress, and to what extent is it driven by improvements in hardware?
- Do these happen in parallel for a given application, or e.g. does some level of hardware development prompt software development?
- Looking at other areas of technological development, what warnings have ever been visible of large otherwise surprising changes? What properties go along with surprising changes?
- What kinds of evidence of upcoming change motivate people to action, historically?
- What is the historical prevalence of discontinuous progress in analogous areas (e.g. technology in general, software, algorithms (I’ve investigated this a bit); very preliminary results suggest discontinuous progress is rare)
Whether brain emulations, brain-inspired AI, or more artificial AI come first is also relevant to this question, as are our expectations about the time until human-level AI appears. So investigations which shed light on those issues should also shed light on this one.
Several of the questions above might be substantially clarified with less than a person-year of effort. With that degree of sophistication I think they have a good chance of changing our best guess about the degree of warning to expect, and perhaps about what people concerned about AI risk should do now. Such a shift seem valuable.
I have claimed that the surprisingness of human-level AI makes quite a difference to what those concerned about AI risk should do now, and that learning more about this surprisingness is cheap and neglected. So it seems pretty plausible to me that investigating the likely surprisingness of human-level AI is a better deal at this point than acting on our current understanding.
I haven’t made a watertight case for the superiority of research into AI surprise, and don’t necessarily believe it. I have gestured at a case however. Do you think it is wrong? Do you know of work on these topics that I should know about?
