AI Impacts

Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

The Singularity Is Near is a book by Ray Kurzweil. It argues that a technological singularity will occur in around 2045. This appears to be largely based on extrapolation from hardware in combination with a guess for how

Wikipedia history of GFLOPS costs

This is a list from Wikipedia, showing hardware configurations that authors claim perform efficiently, along with their prices per GFLOPS at different times in recent history. In it, prices generally fall at around an order of magnitude every five years, and

Trends in the cost of computing

Posted 10 Mar 2015 Computing power available per dollar has probably increased by a factor of ten roughly every four years over the last quarter of a century (measured in FLOPS or MIPS). Over the past 6-8 years, the

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. Contents Interpretation1. How does AI progress depend on hardware and software?1.1 How does AI progress depend qualitatively on hardware and software progress?1.2 How much

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