In 2018 the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, said that “Climate change is the defining issue of our time”. That was a pretty reasonable thing to say in 2018, but I’m not so sure it’s reasonable now. Folks in the climate community probably need to acknowledge that AI is at least as dangerous as climate change and it’s likely to come at us much faster.

I think the timing of these two parallel threats matters. We need to know how to allocate resources, how to communicate with the public, and how to plan for the future.

To help, I’ve created a timeline. Along the top you can see the earliest onset times for some important climate tipping points. Crossing any tipping point could push us into a new, painful equilibrium that is difficult to reverse on human timescales, even if we had huge amounts of resources to throw at the problem.

Timeline details: AGI timelines are based on Metaculus question 5121 with median 2033, lower 25%= 2028 and upper 75%=2045. Climate events show when we could first expect to feel the effects of a particular tipping point. Studies differ widely; here I err on the side of giving the earliest time reported for onset of climate events, so these are aggressive timelines for AMOC and Amazon dieback. The 2037 to 2055 timeline is particularly speculative for AMOC and is hashed to indicate this. Claude assisted with the visual.

Beneath the climate tipping points you can see the distribution of forecasts on a prediction market for the date of the first public Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The estimates here are for a strong form of AGI that aces intelligence tests, has competence in robotics and passes an adversarial Turing Test. This means the AI needs to convince an intelligent judge during a two hour interrogation session that it is actually human, and then also be able to use robotic limbs to assemble a model car. Now if you don’t like prediction markets you can look at trends in software task completion time and you’ll end up with a similar timeline.

If you think that AGI is really dangerous, or will be so powerful that it will drastically lower the obstacles presented by climate change, then it makes sense to prioritize AI safety because it looks like AGI is coming faster. But there are still circumstances where climate change can pose massive, near or medium-term risk. What if AGI comes late and climate ...

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