On Being Wrong About AI

I have a dark vision of humanity's final day, with the Internet (or whatever succeeds it) full of thinkpieces like:

• Yes, We're All About to Die. But Don't Blame AI, Blame Capitalism • Who Decided to Launch the Missiles: Was It President Boebert, Kim Jong Un, or AdvisorBot-4? • Why Slowing Down AI Development Wouldn't Have Helped

To set the record straight: I once gave a ~2% probability for the classic AGI-doom paperclip-maximizer-like scenario. I have a much higher probability for an existential catastrophe in which AI is causally involved in one way or another — there are many possible existential catastrophes (nuclear war, pandemics, runaway climate change…), and many bad people who would cause or fail to prevent them, and I expect AI will soon be involved in just about everything people do! But making a firm prediction would require hashing out what it means for AI to play a "critical causal role" in the catastrophe — for example, did Facebook play a "critical causal role" in Trump's victory in 2016? I'd say it's still not obvious, but in any case, Facebook was far from the only factor.

I don't know of any principle by which I should've predicted what happened. Indeed, we still don't understand why deep learning works, in any way that would let us predict which capabilities will emerge at which scale. The progress has been almost entirely empirical.

Sure, LLMs might automate most white-collar work, saying more about the drudgery of such work than about the power of AI, but they'll never touch the highest reaches of human creativity, which generate ideas that are fundamentally new rather than throwing the old ideas into a statistical blender.

one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same. Live long enough, and you see that year to year and decade to decade, everything doesn't stay the same, even though most days and weeks it seems to.