Blog – Page 9 – AI Impacts

Are AI surveys seeing the inside view?

By Katja Grace, 15 January 2015 An interesting thing about the survey data on timelines to human-level AI is the apparent incongruity between answers to ‘when will human-level AI arrive?’ and answers to ‘how much of the way to human-level AI have

Event: Multipolar AI workshop with Robin Hanson

By Katja Grace, 14 January 2015 On Monday 26 January we will be holding a discussion on promising research projects relating to ‘multipolar‘ AI scenarios. That is, future scenarios where society persists in containing a large number of similarly

Michie and overoptimism

By Katja Grace, 12 January 2015 We recently wrote about Donald Michie’s survey on timelines to human-level AI. Michie’s survey is especially interesting because it was taken in 1972, which is three decades earlier than any other surveys we

Were nuclear weapons cost-effective explosives?

By Katja Grace, 11 January 2015 Nuclear weapons were radically more powerful per pound than any previous bomb. Their appearance was a massive discontinuity in the long-run path of explosive progress, that we have lately discussed.

A summary of AI surveys

By Katja Grace, 10 January 2015 If you want to know when human-level AI will be developed, a natural approach is to ask someone who works on developing AI. You might however be put off by such predictions being regularly criticized

AI and the Big Nuclear Discontinuity

By Katja Grace, 9 January 2015 As we’ve discussed before, the advent of nuclear weapons was a striking technological discontinuity in the effectiveness of explosives. In 1940, no one had ever made an explosive twice as

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

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