Jakub Growiec

Let us imagine a world with artificial superintelligence, surpassing human intellectual capacities in all essential respects: thinking faster and more deeply, predicting future events better, finding better solutions to all difficult puzzles, creating better plans for the future and implementing them more efficiently. Intellectually more capable not only than any...

I am a professor of economics. Throughout my career, I was mostly working on economic growth theory, and this eventually brought me to the topic of transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence. Nowadays my work focuses mostly on the promises and threats of this emerging disruptive technology. Recently, jointly with...

-1- January 2029, Belo Horizonte, Brazil “Uff, glad you fixed the air conditioning, Dad. Without it we’d probably have dropped dead in this heat today.” Lucas walked in, closed the door, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Nice to see you too,” Pedro replied with mild sarcasm. “Hi, Lucas!”...

1 / Prologue Humans really are hopelessly self-absorbed. They’re completely incapable of imagining that someone could be intelligent without being human. When they dream up gods, aliens, or other mythical beings, somehow these creatures always end up thinking and behaving exactly like humans—humans from the same historical period, specifically. The...

Tl;dr Experts agree: nobody truly understands what happens inside modern artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, i.e., multi-layered neural networks. Neither can anyone control these processes. Meanwhile, due to scaling laws, their capabilities are improving systematically and dynamically. As Stephen Hawking once said, "there is no physical law precluding particles from being...

It looks like we are going to build artificial superintelligence (ASI). According to various sources, this could happen within a few, at most a dozen or so, years. Superintelligence is more than artificial general intelligence (AGI). It refers to algorithms capable of performing absolutely all tasks that humans do today—only...

Transformative AI poses an imminent existential risk to humanity, and yet we're spending close to zero dollars on mitigating this risk. This feels wrong, but by how much? In a recent paper "The Economics of p(doom): Scenarios of Existential Risk and Economic Growth in the Age of Transformative AI", Klaus...