I think accelerating AI is justified largely because of the enormously positive impacts I expect it to bring to billions of people alive today: faster medical developments, dramatically increased economic prosperity, and much greater product variety from technological innovation.

Some have asked me: why do I focus on these short-term impacts of accelerating AI to justify my pro-acceleration view, rather than on the impacts that might occur over the upcoming billions of years?

The first thing worth pointing out about this question is that, at least in my experience, it almost never comes up outside of debates about AI. In virtually every other area of human decision-making, people generally accept without much argument that the very-long-term consequences of our actions are extremely difficult to predict. Because of this extreme uncertainty, most people intuitively recognize that we should place less weight on projected very-long-term effects, since we simply cannot know with any confidence what those effects will actually turn out to be.

When policymakers debate housing regulations, or when patients decide whether to undergo a medical procedure, or when nations consider going to war, almost nobody would accept an argument structured like this: "We should willingly accept devastating costs over [...]

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.