2020 – Page 3 – AI Impacts

Time for AI to cross the human performance range in Go

Computer Go took over 30 years to go from beginner level to superhuman.

Time for AI to cross the human performance range in chess

Computer chess took around 50 years to go from beginner level to superhuman level.

Relevant pre-AGI possibilities

Daniel Kokotajlo June 2020
Brainstorm of ways the world could be relevantly different by the time advanced AGI arrives

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.