When going about trying to ensure that AI does not cause an existential catastrophe, it's likely important to understand how AI will develop in the future, and why exactly it might or might not cause such a catastrophe. In this episode, I interview Katja Grace, researcher at AI Impacts, who's done work surveying AI researchers about when they expect superhuman AI to be reached, collecting data about how rapidly AI tends to progress, and thinking about the weak points in arguments that AI could be catastrophic for humanity.

 

Topics we discuss:

 - 00:00:34 - AI Impacts and its research

 - 00:08:59 - How to forecast the future of AI

 - 00:13:33 - Results of surveying AI researchers

 - 00:30:41 - Work related to forecasting AI takeoff speeds

   - 00:31:11 - How long it takes AI to cross the human skill range

   - 00:42:47 - How often technologies have discontinuous progress

   - 00:50:06 - Arguments for and against fast takeoff of AI

 - 01:04:00 - Coherence arguments

 - 01:12:15 - Arguments that AI might cause existential catastrophe, and counter-arguments

   - 01:13:58 - The size of the super-human range of intelligence

   - 01:17:22 - The dangers of agentic AI

   - 01:25:45 - The difficulty of human-compatible goals

   - 01:33:54 - The possibility of AI destroying everything

 - 01:49:42 - The future of AI Impacts

 - 01:52:17 - AI Impacts vs academia

 - 02:00:25 - What AI x-risk researchers do wrong

 - 02:01:43 - How to follow Katja's and AI Impacts' work

 

The transcript: axrp.net/episode/2021/07/23/episode-10-ais-future-and-dangers-katja-grace.html

 

"When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts": arxiv.org/abs/1705.08807

AI Impacts page of more complete survey results: aiimpacts.org/2016-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai

Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI: aiimpacts.org/likelihood-of-discontinuous-progress-around-the-development-of-agi

Discontinuous progress investigation: aiimpacts.org/discontinuous-progress-investigation

The range of human intelligence: aiimpacts.org/is-the-range-of-human-intelligence-small