In this week’s episode of “Interesting Times,” my new podcast, I interview Daniel Kokotajlo, an artificial intelligence researcher who is one of the authors of a forecast, “AI 2027,” envisioning an incredible “intelligence explosion” in the next two years. Kokotajlo and his collaborators believe this will deliver humanity swiftly to a choice between two possible futures: one in which digital superintelligence is tamed to our service but every aspect of our society is changed and one in which it escapes our control and — well, if you’ve seen the “Terminator” movies, you can guess what happens next. Predictions are hard, a wise man once observed, especially about the future. Kokotajlo is offering a radical one while conceding that reality will probably be different, and I am not decamping with my family for an Alaskan bunker after interviewing him. But there are three broad reasons his forecast should be taken seriously. The first is that the recent trend in A.I. capacity has consistently outstripped many observers’ expectations. Aggressive predictions — including Kokotajlo’s previous forecast, from 2021 — have tended to be better guides than cautious ones. So you shouldn’t expect a future exactly like the one in “AI 2027,” but given recent trends, you should absolutely be open to high strangeness, sudden rupture and existential risk. Second, even a slower pace of change will still deliver milder versions of the two great problems discussed in the forecast: an increasing sense of human obsolescence as A.I. takes over our work and imitates our personalities and the possibility for some sort of great disaster if the new systems run amok. Such risks need not be as total as this prophecy envisions to define the future that we face. Finally, it’s important to be aware of radical visions of the future because they are shared by many of the rich and powerful people who are running the A.I. revolution. For some, they’re an apocalyptic shadow over their work, for others a utopian possibility, for many both at once. And even if you suspect that these beliefs are unwarranted or deluded, it’s surely still a notable fact that many of our age’s leading capitalists believe that they’re operating far outside the normal parameters of American industry, conjuring gods or demons that could make our entire world obsolete. Listen, watch or read the transcript here: Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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