February 2015 – AI Impacts

What’s up with nuclear weapons?

By Katja Grace, 27 February 2015 When nuclear weapons were first built, the explosive power you could extract from a tonne of explosive skyrocketed. But why? Here’s a guess. Until nuclear weapons, explosives were based on chemical reactions. Whereas

Possible Empirical Investigations

In the course of our work, we have noticed a number of empirical questions which bear on our forecasts and might be (relatively) cheap to resolve. In the future we hope to address some of

Research topic: Hardware, software and AI

This is the first in a sequence of articles outlining research which could help forecast AI development. Interpretation Concrete research projects are in boxes. ∑5 ∆8 means we guess the project will take (very) roughly five hours, and we rate its value (very)

Multipolar research questions

By Katja Grace, 11 February 2015 The Multipolar AI workshop we ran a fortnight ago went well, and we just put up a list of research projects from it. I hope this is helpful inspiration to those of you thinking about applying

List of multipolar research projects

This list currently consists of research projects suggested at the Multipolar AI workshop we held on January 26 2015. Relatively concrete projects are marked [concrete]. These are more likely to already include specific questions to answer and feasible methods to answer them

How AI timelines are estimated

By Katja Grace, 9 February 2015 A natural approach to informing oneself about when human-level AI will arrive is to check what experts who have already investigated the question say about it. So we made this list of analyses that we could find. It’s

At-least-human-level-at-human-cost AI

By Katja Grace, 7 February 2015 Often, when people are asked ‘when will human-level AI arrive?’ they suggest that it is a meaningless or misleading term. I think they have a point. Or several, though probably

Penicillin and syphilis

By Katja Grace, 2 February 2015 Penicillin was a hugely important discovery. But was it a discontinuity in the normal progression of research, or just an excellent discovery which followed a slightly less excellent discovery,

Discontinuous progress investigation

Published Feb 2, 2015; last substantially updated April 12 2020 We have collected cases of discontinuous technological progress to inform our understanding of whether artificial intelligence performance is likely to undergo such a discontinuity. This page