AI Impacts

What if you turned the world’s hardware into AI minds?

By Katja Grace, 4 September 2016 In a classic ‘AI takes over the world’ scenario, one of the first things an emerging superintelligence wants to do is steal most of the world’s computing hardware and repurpose it to running the AI’s

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