The Roots of Progress Institute is seeking to commission stories for a new article series, “Intelligence Age,” on future applications of AI.
These will be reported essays, not science fiction. We want to understand how AI might change individual sectors of the economy and the working lives of the people within them. What happens to traditional filmmaking when AI can make good movies? What will it be like to date with an emotionally intelligent AI vetting the pool of potential partners?
Or: we’d like to commission one or more stories about the future of the legal profession in the age of AI. We can partly understand that by talking to lawyers on the cutting edge of AI use, but we also want you to extrapolate out and think multiple moves ahead in the game. How long until consumers can trust legal services AI models to vet contracts? What kinds of businesses and services currently don’t exist because would-be entrepreneurs need but can’t afford legal services? How might declining legal services costs increase productivity in other sectors? Should we expect to see more patents? More business formation? Tell us about disruption and whether large incumbent firms might face more competition from two-lawyer startups using AI to undercut prices. Explore protectionist pushback from trade associations that defend the occupational licensing privileges of attorneys.
RPI’s “Intelligence Age” series will bring this level of scrutiny to any field where AI has applications.
The list below reflects the kinds of stories we’d like to see. It’s not exhaustive, and we don’t need stories to match these prompts one-for-one. Ultimately, we want to hear what you think your piece should be about.
Virtual businesses. What are the implications of being able to spin up an entire company full of virtual workers—anything from engineers to designers to sales to customer support? How will software startups change when anyone can launch an app for $20k instead of $2M? How will VC change? What other types of virtual businesses might people launch?
Professional services. What happens when there are AI lawyers, doctors, accountants, therapists? How will that transform these services and their usage of them? What happens when these services are democratized, and everyone can afford them? What part of them can be automated in the foreseeable future, and what can’t? What are the barriers to professional licensing requirements? (Note: pitches should focus on one industry, preferably a narrow aspect of that industry.)
Finance. What happens when AIs start trading on financial markets in large numbers? How does this transform these markets? What does it do to market prices? What does it ultimately do to the availability of capital?
Translation. What happens when language is no longer a barrier to communication? Can anyone read any book, article, essay, or paper in any language? Smartphone users can already dictate and instantaneously translate their speech. What is the next evolutionary stage of real-time translation? How far are we from a practical version of Douglas Adams’ Babel Fish?
Science. How can AI accelerate science? Which fields might see the most acceleration soonest—math, theoretical physics? What would it take to, say, solve all outstanding major open math questions? How can AI help in other fields, short of robotic labs? What parts of the work of researchers can be automated in the foreseeable future? How would that transform how labs are organized, how research is funded, and how science is done?
Education. What will be the effects of AI on education? On the one hand, every student can have a wise, knowledgeable, friendly, and infinitely patient tutor. On the other hand, both K–12 and university seem fairly entrenched and sclerotic. Also, a virtual tutor can’t fully substitute for physical presence. What would education ideally look like? What will it likely look like, given the state of our institutions?
Creative class / arts & entertainment. Imagine that one person, working alone, can produce an entire feature-length film. Or that AI can produce a film for you on-demand based on a description of what you’d like to watch. How does that change entertainment? What new forms of interactive entertainment might arise with AI characters, or new role-playing games led by AI game masters? What about music, novels, etc.? What else might people do with the ability to realize any kind of creative vision, with little effort and no special skill?
Match-making. We spend a lot of time trying to find two-way matches: dating, job-hunting, fundraising. How could AI help? Could we teach AI agents what we want, and then have the agents all talk to each other to do the first round of filtering? Could AI be a virtual matchmaker or recruiter?
Government. What happens when anyone can easily fill out any form or report of any length, and generally comply with any bureaucratic process very cheaply? What happens when environment impact statements are easy to create–is NEPA still a drag on the economy? What happens when AI is used on a mass scale to write letters to representatives or comment on proposed rulemaking? What happens when AI is used to draft laws? And what happens on the other side of all these things, where the people who receive and review these documents become overwhelmed—will they use AI to keep up?
Industrial infrastructure. Can AI help manage supply chains? The power grid? Agriculture? How so? How might this change things?
War. AI will undoubtedly enable us to create new weapons, including autonomous weapons—also known as killer robots—and will transform tactics and strategies. What does the next major war look like? How does this change geopolitics and the balance of power?
Wearables. Imagine that everyone is wearing Meta Ray-Bans everywhere, with live video and audio fed to an LLM, which you can talk to at any time.
Robotics. How can robotics use deep learning techniques for perception and motion and LLMs for conceptual intelligence? Is this the final advance needed to have generally useful robots helping around the home, office, and factory? Will they be humanoid, or specialized for different tasks? What’s the timeline for all this?
Personal agents. The classic sci-fi idea is that you will have an AI personal assistant who does all kinds of things for you—shopping, trip planning, paperwork, etc. Can we come up with any new or insightful ideas about this? How does it transform marketing and sales if everyone researches and makes purchasing decisions through agents?
We are operating under the following assumptions about the near future of AI:
1. The technology will rapidly improve in capabilities, speed, and cost.
2. AI will be faster and cheaper than humans, extremely knowledgeable, reliable, scalable, and available 24/7. But it won’t have qualitatively superhuman intelligence or mystical insight. Any one task it does is something that some human could have done, in theory, given enough time.
3. AI must be adapted to each specific task. This will take product development effort, and it won’t be automatic.
4. AI will be adopted incrementally. People will initially use it to perform a few discrete tasks, then gradually take on more complex and larger tasks, and eventually work on autonomous projects, and so on.
5. Each market consists of many individuals with different roles, viewpoints, and incentives, and they will each react to AI based on their context.
6. Economics applies. When AI lowers the cost of a service, it will expand consumption of that service; new uses will be found that aren’t economical at the old price point. When AI lowers the overall cost of a project, it will be easier to raise funding for that project, and more such projects will be done. When AI lowers every firm’s costs, they will compete partly by reducing prices.
You can submit your pitch here!
Tell us how you plan to approach the piece, what novel insights you can bring, and what sources you’ll use. If we approve your pitch, you will work with an RPI editor throughout the process.
We are looking for stories that range from ~2,500 to ~3,500 words, and will pay $2 per published word.
The Intelligence Age series is made possible by a generous grant from OpenAI. (RPI will have editorial independence over the project; OpenAI will not preview or vet the stories.) We thank them for their support!