Speed of AI Transition – Page 3

Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI

We aren’t convinced by any of the arguments we’ve seen to expect large discontinuity in AI progress above the extremely low base rate for all technologies. However this topic is controversial, and many thinkers on

Historic trends in altitude

Published 7 Feb 2020 Altitude of objects attained by man-made means has seen six discontinuities of more than ten years of progress at previous rates since 1783, shown below. Year Height (m) Discontinuity (years) Entity

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

The range of human intelligence

This page may be out-of-date. Visit the updated version of this page on our wiki. The range of human intelligence seems large relative to the space below it, as measured by performance on tasks we

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

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