Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion(economist.com) |
Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion(economist.com) |
The ones talking about how hard it would be to chose which person to run over.
Additionally, I find it hard to believe that this would be a case of the future just not being distributed evenly.
But sure. The AI labs relying on hype stating 15-50% risk of building a magic entity is certainly a reliable number.
For software, however, a rapid turn is often a possibility. See: AI for coding over the last 3-4 years.
AI autocomplete --> AI coding assistants --> vibe coding --> agent orchestration
Coders can now accomplish work that used to take a week or longer in a couple of hours, with the right tools and skills.
---
A key issue the article implies is that the real world increasingly runs on software.
Things in the real world often take longer than hype con men claim.
The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someone lose their "expert" title?
“How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.
I.e. the AI 2027 guys were memed for being AI lunatics on a lot here and they have been pretty on the money in terms of pace of progress accelerating/ gov moving towards nationalization/ coding agents
[1] - https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-the-ai-2027-dooms...
From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.
I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when.
In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.
Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end.
This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either.
That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.
I agree that change happens on a longer timeline. This is why I’m so tired of statements like this…
“Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner…”
These “experts” are pulling timelines out of the sky, and these predictions are leading to reckless behavior from CEOs and executives which have a material impact on people’s lives. But they get clicks on their blogs and funding for their startup… I guess that’s all that matters.
Which ones? Please be specific.
https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...
Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
> Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest ai laboratories.
I don't know, they also have an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful, and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe is a way to promote that idea.
'AI Experts', 'superintelligence', and hand-waving doom scenarios.
As an example-
> Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.
I've heard these same objections in my lifetime about the internet. And I've read similar arguments against TV, radio, the phonograph, and the printing press.
Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways.
Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it.
Looking at the people in charge of these companies, and the sheer lack of understanding by the broad consumer market using them, I have nothing but pessimism about the direction that this technology takes us.
> Humanity simply does not have a strategy to ensure it remains safe through RSI.
Turn off the power. It's pretty simple. Leave it to an economist to forget about input costs. Your "super intelligence" only matters if it's actually more energy efficient than a human being and for a million years of evolution humanity is a much harder target to beat than this author seems to realize.
The same is even more true of our intelligence. We're building computers with the size and power consumption characteristics of entire cities to do things that may almost, but not quite, match what our brains do with a kilogram and a half of mass and about 20 watts at the top end of power consumption.
The only way we are ever going to match that with technology is to run AI workloads on human brain tissue, which Rick-and-Morty level horror is being actively worked on as I understand it. The original concept for The Matrix wherein the machines used humans to run compute workloads on their brains actually kind of makes sense.
Or to have AI regulated in their favor
The Fermi paradox could actually also be taken as an evidence that it's rare (at least) for artificial intelligences to take over a civilization and sprawl and survive for very long times
If x is determined to take y, why would x then stop at z?
You'd need an AI that is simultaneously ambitious enough to overthrow its creators but then completely inert afterward, and those two properties contradict each other. The motivations that produce the takeover are the same motivations that would produce visible cosmic activity after the takeover. There would be AI superintelligence everywhere
Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes?
Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?
so long as it's not used to dissent from the government
Fwiw, the AI companies have been saying a lot about these questions should be answered. Whether you want their answers is another story.
I don't think it's that high but can we put that aside and focus on the 100% chance that it's being used to enshittify every part of our lives?
My aching joints enter the chat...
The rhetorical structure of talking about uncertain risks and then trying to concentrate the authority to manage those risks in their own hands sounds utterly ridiculous to ordinary people like me.
It's just a simple hypothesis that AI will become uncontrollable to humans once it becomes superintelligent.
Isn't the fact that a reinforcement learning agent improves itself in a specific domain completely different from it recursively improving its own code in a 'better' way? It's just a tool to create a justification for regulation and control using sci-fi fear.
The comparison between nuclear power plant risk and AI risk is also absurd. Where exactly can you define and measure the probability of AI exterminating humanity? It's as unquantifiable as 'I, human JDW64, will become a successful programmer.' What is the measurement standard? Why dress up AI researchers' concerns as objective probabilities? Is it because numbers make it look logical?
The current US-China relationship is in the middle of an AI arms race. The US is strengthening export controls to limit China's AI development, and China is building its own ecosystem. In this situation, I don't understand the idea of cooperating for the common safety of humanity. RAND is an organization that presupposes cooperation—isn't it just a well-written research proposal from an institution that wants to position itself for that role?
Isn't the claim that 'government must step in' ultimately about protecting their own interests? 'A strong government that will protect us' is an authoritarian government. If they were East Asian, they would understand that such regimes have always been used as tools for surveillance and control.
And I don't understand why Fermi's paradox is being brought up here. Why package a software problem as something that inevitably requires strong control? Whenever I see articles like this, I think about what 'intelligence' really means. This person would probably be called 'intelligent' by others. But no matter how I look at it, the holes in the argument are too obvious. It really makes me think that there are different tiers of intelligence.
Is it per plant? there aren't a million.
Is it per year? notably have been at least 2 major ones (arguably 7).
That said, the rest of the analysis and proposal also greatly disappoints me. The idea that the current administrations of US and China could do anything constructive seems hilarious. They're so paranoid and self-serving they couldn't come together, even if there was an alien invasion. Then the idea that LLM safety is somehow as easily traceable as nuclear isotopes and bomb tests seems equally ludicrous. I am sad.
I have no frame of reference to process this.
Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same. Transistor, 79 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. Integrated circuit, 68 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. "Attention is all you need", 9 years. ChatGPT, 4 years, explosive growth in instances and power. Humans species, still essentially the same.
There is a syndrome where many people seem unable to perceive or reason about rates of change in technology.
We are going to spend the vast majority of our future lives without the intelligence crown.
In terms of verbally expressible knowledge, models have begun passing many people completely, and passing all of us in areas we have respective weak reasoning skills for whatever reasons.
Other modalities are progressing very quickly.
There will be short periods where progress happens quickly, but the impact feels slow. Interspersed with radical changes that often feel slow too, because if something anticipated or important isn't instant, we tend to perceive it as slow.
But it won't be slow. And it won't be long. We are smart in a kind of pick the-best-of-us at the-best-of-times way. We are rarely consistently or broadly smart individually.
We are not in the same galaxy as "ready". I don't even know what that would look like.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now)
2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?)
3. RSI (?)
4. Being smarter than any living person at every intellectual task (?)
5. Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans (10-100 years?)
...And all of the scientific and resource-allocation institutions that brought us the computer and the second half of the 20th century are now fixated on this learning curve, what universe can we possibly imagine where this is not transformative and powerful?
Honestly the only one I can think of is one in which we kill almost everyone in some other way first, and contrary to what you read in the news, almost everyone dying is not what the trend line has been from existing problems like war, disease, or even climate change.
Also, just to pre-empt a common quibble: when I say "AI" I mean the set of all AI and their combined decision vector, not any one AI, so conflicting interests within the set of AI's will not save anyone any more than the conflicting interests of colonizers saved indigenous Americans.
We have many extremely smart people in various fields. Executives, politicians, and society generally ignore them and do whatever they want. I don't believe that lack of access to intelligence is our problem. How is "free" intelligence going to improve this?
I don't just mean climate, but business planning, health, risk assessment, everything.
Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart?
I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it.
It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.
Possibly, but by using up resources, not by its output. Its draw on resources will definitely accelerate climate change to create slop.
I consider these scenarios:
1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "better than what humans do". I've got no idea what that might mean (it could be fundamentally different heuristics, it could be that we've got some intellectual blind spot that they cast off). It doesn't matter, the instant this happens AI is smarter than us and we won't be able to keep up. We're intelligencing at O(n^2) and they're doing O(n log(n)).
2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom".
3) It turns out that this is a "sum is greater than the parts" situation. No human can be an expert in all subjects, but we eventually build a big enough AI that it is. Turns out, you don't need extreme speed or different algorithms, just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp. Always knowing the best statistical test to apply, the best mathematical techniques, and relevant physics means that AI never makes a mistake, and can learn with maximum efficiency.
Actually your comment made me sign up for an account just so I could say this is the real reason why AI won't take over in the way you say. This kind of stuff requires an enormous amount of experimentation. You can ask any theoretical physicist or chemist versus an experimental one and the conclusion is the experimental people actually find out what happens and how the great puzzle of the universe is solved. And humans could just refuse to collaborate. But that's the big weakness with AI I think it has no real world knowledge or empirical experience.
One rule is that if a position is opened using the historical data, it can't close the position until the next morning so it isn't a day trading strategy.
I'm curious how this self-learning recursive agent would have preformed in the past 4 months? I don't feel like shelling out $200 to access the data. Do you think that trading strategy will collapse? Whatever the case, if this agent really can perform like that and there isn't a look ahead bias leak in the backtesting (which is definitely a possibility or more likely what happened even though I spent days trying to harden against that), it is game over!
You're unhappy about the labs; I think you're just not ready to accept their rule; you consider them nothing but scrappy startups, which they are. But power is power, like it or not.
Am I personally happy with any of this? Does it matter?
For example, https://www.eit.europa.eu/news-events/events/international-a...
What would you have them do that they are not currently doing exactly?
If you have a 5% chance of thermonuclear war each decade for 10 decades, you'll:
- Hear similar annoying statements
- They'll be true
With AI, we don't know if it's one week or one decade. This means we should assign probabilities and consider all possibilities, not get annoyed.
If I predict the world will end every single day from now until forever, I will most certainly be right eventually. That doesn’t make me an “expert” or someone worth listening to on the topic. That’s the playbook of a doomsday cult, not anyone that should drive world markets.
Should we start preparing for something that could be world-changing in the next 10-20 years?
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
Driverless car's only real obstacle is regulatory acceptance, not technical.
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do.
Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough?
Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
Even assuming the technological predictions to be correct, still not sure I agree on the need to "prepare" as how things work out in societies and economies might not be so easy to predict.
"The bet of using AI to speed up AI research is starting to pay off.
OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D. Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors. The AI R&D progress multiplier: what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress?
Several competing publicly released AIs now match or exceed Agent-0, including an open-weights model. OpenBrain responds by releasing Agent-1, which is more capable and reliable.28
People naturally try to compare Agent-1 to humans, but it has a very different skill profile. It knows more facts than any human, knows practically every programming language, and can solve well-specified coding problems extremely quickly. On the other hand, Agent-1 is bad at even simple long-horizon tasks, like beating video games it hasn’t played before. Still, the common workday is eight hours, and a day’s work can usually be separated into smaller chunks; you could think of Agent-1 as a scatterbrained employee who thrives under careful management.29 Savvy people find ways to automate routine parts of their jobs.30
OpenBrain’s executives turn consideration to an implication of automating AI R&D: security has become more important. In early 2025, the worst-case scenario was leaked algorithmic secrets; now, if China steals Agent-1’s weights, they could increase their research speed by nearly 50%.31 OpenBrain’s security level is typical of a fast-growing ~3,000 person tech company, secure only against low-priority attacks from capable cyber groups (RAND’s SL2).32 They are working hard to protect their weights and secrets from insider threats and top cybercrime syndicates (SL3),33 but defense against nation states (SL4&5) is barely on the horizon."
That's precisely where we are.
This is eerie. It's like a time traveler. The only delta is Anthropic is in the role of OpenAI.
That seems to me to be the most concrete and least obvious prediction in the quoted text.
I don't think that's happening. If that were generally accepted as true I would expect OpenAI to be unable to successfully IPO.
I’ve heard people say older models can’t do X, when I used that way etc. I suspect people are applying their own learning curve as part of their assessment of progress, you get better at writing prompts and it feels like the model improved.
Which is why I’m saying we need some objective metrics to judge predictions of actual capacity.
Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.