First nuclear reaction
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The Biggest Technological Leaps

By Katja Grace, 9 January 2015 Over thousands of years, humans became better at producing explosions. A weight of explosive that would have blown up a tree stump in the year 800 could have blown

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Blog

The AI Impacts Blog

By Katja Grace, 9 January 2015 Welcome to the AI Impacts blog.  AI Impacts is premised on two ideas (at least!): The details of the arrival of human-level artificial intelligence matterSeven years to prepare is very different from

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Cases of Discontinuous Technological Progress

We know of ten events which produced a robust discontinuity in progress equivalent to more than one hundred years at previous rates in some interesting metric. We know of 53 other events which produced smaller

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Continuity of progress

Effect of nuclear weapons on historic trends in explosives

Nuclear weapons constituted a ~7 thousand year discontinuity in relative effectiveness factor (TNT equivalent per kg of explosive). Nuclear weapons do not appear to have clearly represented progress in the cost-effectiveness of explosives, though the

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AI Timeline Surveys

AGI-09 Survey

Baum et al. surveyed 21 attendees of the AGI-09 conference, on AGI timelines with and without extra funding. They also asked about other details of AGI development such as social impacts, and promising approaches. Their findings include the following:

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AI Timeline Surveys

Bainbridge Survey

A survey of twenty-six technology experts in 2005 produced a median of 2085 as the year in which artificial intelligence would be able to functionally replicate a human brain (p344). They rated this application 5.6/10 in beneficialness to

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AI Timeline Surveys

AI@50 Survey

A seemingly informal seven-question poll was taken of participants at the AI@50 conference in 2006. 41% of respondents said it would take more than 50 years for AI to simulate every aspect of human intelligence, and 41%

AI Timelines

Early Views of AI

This is an incomplete list of early works we have found discussing AI or AI related problems. List 1. Claude Shannon (1950), in Programming a Computer for Playing Chess, offers the following list of “possible developments in

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AI Timeline Surveys

FHI Winter Intelligence Survey

The Future of Humanity Institute administered a survey in 2011 at their Winter Intelligence AGI impacts conference. Participants’ median estimate for a 50% chance of human-level AI was 2050. Details AI timelines question The survey included

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AI Timeline Surveys

Hanson AI Expert Survey

In a small informal survey running since 2012, AI researchers generally estimated that their subfields have moved less than ten percent of the way to human-level intelligence. Only one (in the slowest moving subfield) observed acceleration.