Miguel Afonso Caetano"The start of the next large scale transformation of society has begun. If AI is a normal technology, it’s normal in the sense of agriculture, industrialisation, or public health. The question is what this looks like, and I think the above gives us a few places to think more carefully about the impacts.
First, how strong is this base rate? We should obviously be skeptical of expert predictions intuition, given their track record. Traditional judgemental forecasting best practices starts with the base rate, and adjusts on that basis - but this suffers from a reference class problem; should our base rate be for technological revolutions, which the above assumes, or should we be asking about the emergence of a new smarter species, akin to evolutionary transitions? Even if it’s the correct base rate, we have such a small n, with so many differences, that our views about what is changing could easily overwhelm the base rate.
Second, if AI follows the trend, we would ask how long the negative period lasts. Agriculture’s temporary misery was 10,000 years, the Industrial revolution’s negative phase was closer to 100, and it seems plausible AI’s harmful phase will be continuing the trend on a logistic scale, so that we might be in for an annus horribilis to end all others. Of course, the depth of the trough is incredibly significant! We could see mass disruption, unemployment, riots, national and international collapses due to a complete end of trust in objective truth not literally perceived. If we pull through, this might be followed by a benefit that is almost unimaginable - but if the transition, however brief, includes mass-scale biological weapons, nuclear war, or other global catastrophes, the median human would (and will, and loudly does) oppose any such transition."
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