EA - How quickly AI could transform the world (Tom Davidson on The 80,000 Hours Podcast) by 80000 Hours

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How quickly AI could transform the world (Tom Davidson on The 80,000 Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on May 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Over at The 80,000 Hours Podcast we just published an interview that is likely to be of particular interest to people who identify as involved in the effective altruism community: Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world.You can click through for the audio, a full transcript and related links. Below is the episode summary and some key excerpts.Episode SummaryBy the time that the AIs can do 20% of cognitive tasks in the broader economy, maybe they can already do 40% or 50% of tasks specifically in AI R&D. So they could have already really started accelerating the pace of progress by the time we get to that 20% economic impact threshold.At that point you could easily imagine that really it’s just one year, you give them a 10x bigger brain. That’s like going from chimps to humans — and then doing that jump again. That could easily be enough to go from [AIs being able to do] 20% [of cognitive tasks] to 100%, just intuitively. I think that’s kind of the default, really.Tom DavidsonIt’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from.For example: what if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a single year? And what if we then told you that those improvements would lead to explosive economic growth unlike anything humanity has seen before?You might think, “Congratulations, you said a big number — but this kind of stuff seems crazy, so I’m going to keep scrolling through Twitter.”But this 1,000x yearly improvement is a prediction based on real economic models created by today’s guest Tom Davidson, Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy. By the end of the episode, you’ll either be able to point out specific flaws in his step-by-step reasoning, or have to at least consider the idea that the world is about to get — at a minimum — incredibly weird.As a teaser, consider the following:Developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that can do 100% of cognitive tasks at least as well as the best humans can — could very easily lead us to an unrecognisable world.You might think having to train AI systems individually to do every conceivable cognitive task — one for diagnosing diseases, one for doing your taxes, one for teaching your kids, etc. — sounds implausible, or at least like it’ll take decades.But Tom thinks we might not need to train AI to do every single job — we might just need to train it to do one: AI research.And building AI capable of doing research and development might be a much easier task — especially given that the researchers training the AI are AI researchers themselves.And once an AI system is as good at accelerating future AI progress as the best humans are today — and we can run billions of copies of it round the clock — it’s hard to make the case that we won’t achieve AGI very quickly.To give you some perspective: 17 years ago we saw the launch of Twitter, the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and your first chance to play the Nintendo Wii.Tom thinks that if we have AI that significantly accelerates AI R&D, then it’s hard to imagine not having AGI 17 years from now.Wild.Host Luisa Rodriguez gets Tom to walk us through his careful reports on the topic, and how he came up with these numbers, across a terrifying but fascinating three hours.Luisa and Tom also discuss:How we might go from GPT-4 to AI disasterTom’s journey from finding AI risk to be kind of scary to really scaryWhether international cooperation or an anti-AI social movement can slow AI progress downWhy it might take just a few years to go from pretty good AI to superhum...