AI Impacts

Sources of advantage for digital agents over biological agents

Artificial agents should have several advantages over humans. Details The following is an excerpt from Superintelligence (Bostrom, 2014), reproduced with permission. It outlines ten advantages Bostrom expects digital intelligences to have over human intelligences. Sources of advantage for digital intelligence Minor

Examples of early action on risks

Contents DetailsDiscussionExamples Details Discussion There are many current efforts to mitigate risks from artificial intelligence. We might learn something about the likelihood of these efforts influencing AI risk by looking at similar past efforts. To this end, we are

Friendly AI as a global public good

By Katja Grace, 8 August 2016 A public good, in the economic sense, can be (roughly) characterized as a desirable good that is likely to be undersupplied, or not supplied at all, by private companies.

Costs of extinction risk mitigation

We very roughly estimate that the annual cost of reducing the probability of human extinction by 0.01% is within the range of $1.1 billion to $3.5 trillion. Contents IntroductionMotivationApproachAnalysis: planetary defense against asteroid or comet

Returns to scale in research

When universities or university departments produce research outputs—such as published papers—they sometimes experience increasing returns to scale, sometimes constant returns to scale, and sometimes decreasing returns to scale. At the level of nations however, R&D

Selected Citations

This page is out-of-date. Visit the updated version of this page on our wiki. A non-exhaustive collection of places where AI Impacts’ work has been cited. Contents AI TimelinesComputing Power and the BrainCost of ComputingMathematical

Error in Armstrong and Sotala 2012

By Katja Grace, 17 May 2016 Can AI researchers say anything useful about when strong AI will arrive? Back in 2012, Stuart Armstrong and Kaj Sotala weighed in on this question in a paper called ‘How We’re

Metasurvey: predict the predictors

By Katja Grace, 12 May 2016 As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been making a survey for AI researchers. The survey asks when AI will be able to do things like build a lego kit according to the instructions, be a surgeon, or radically

Concrete AI tasks bleg

By Katja Grace, 30 March 2016 We’re making a survey. I hope to write soon about our general methods and plans, so anyone kind enough to criticize them has the chance. Before that though, we have a different request: we want a list

Mysteries of global hardware

By Katja Grace, 7 March 2016 This blog post summarizes recent research on our Global Computing Capacity page. See that page for full citations and detailed reasoning. We recently investigated this intriguing puzzle: FLOPS (then) apparently performed by all of the world’s computing