April 2020 – AI Impacts

Map of the first transatlantic telegraph

Description vs simulated prediction

Rick Korzekwa April 2020
What are we trying to do when we look at history to inform forecasting?

Surveys on fractional progress towards HLAI

How long until human-level performance, if we naively extrapolate progress since researchers joined their subfields?

2019 recent trends in Geekbench score per CPU price

From 2006 – 2020, Geekbench score per CPU price has grown by around 16% a year, for rates that would yield an order of magnitude over roughly 16 years.

Precedents for economic n-year doubling before 4n-year doubling

Does the economy ever double without having first doubled four times slower? Yes, but not since 3000BC.

Resolutions of mathematical conjectures over time

The time-to-proof for past mathematical problems currently remembered as notable is exponentially distributed with a half life of around 100 years.

Trends in DRAM price per gigabyte

The price of a gigabyte of DRAM has fallen by about a factor of ten every 5 years from 1957 to 2020. Since 2010, the price has fallen much more slowly, at a rate that

Discontinuous progress in history: an update

Katja Grace April 2020
We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends. This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details.

Preliminary survey of prescient actions

In a short search, we did not find clear examples of ‘prescient actions’—specific efforts to address severe and complex problems decades ahead of time and in the absence of broader scientific concern, experience with analogous problems…

Takeaways from safety by default interviews

Asya Bergal

Last year, several researchers at AI Impacts (primarily Robert Long and I) interviewed prominent researchers inside and outside of the AI safety field who are relatively optimistic about advanced AI being developed safely. These interviews were originally intended to focus narrowly on reasons for optimism, but we ended up covering a variety of topics, including AGI timelines, the likelihood of current techniques leading to AGI, and what the right things to do in AI safety are right now. (…)

Interviews on plausibility of AI safety by default

This is a list of interviews on the plausibility of AI safety by default. Background AI Impacts conducted interviews with several thinkers on AI safety in 2019 as part of a project exploring arguments for