I’m going to ignore all “AI is different” arguments for the sake of this comment, even though I agree with some of them. Let’s assume I grant all your points. The agricultural revolution took a couple of millennia. The industrial revolution took a couple of centuries. And now, the AI revolution will take decades.
This means I can equivalently restate your conclusion as, “Human activity will lose almost all economic value by the time my newborn niece would have finished grad school.” This is certainly slower than many timeline predictions today, but it’s hardly “slow” by most standards, and is in fact still faster than the median timelines of most experts as of 5 years ago.
Of course, one of the important facts about these past transitions is that each petered out after bootstrapping civilization far enough to start the next one that’s 10x faster. So, if the world in 2047 is 1000x richer and moving at AGI speeds compared to today, then the next 1000x change should take a few years, and the next one after that a few months. This still implies “singularity by 2050.” We’d probably have about an extra decade to ensure our survival, though, which I would agree is great.
I’m going to ignore all “AI is different” arguments for the sake of this comment, even though I agree with some of them. Let’s assume I grant all your points. The agricultural revolution took a couple of millennia. The industrial revolution took a couple of centuries. And now, the AI revolution will take decades.
This means I can equivalently restate your conclusion as, “Human activity will lose almost all economic value by the time my newborn niece would have finished grad school.” This is certainly slower than many timeline predictions today, but it’s hardly “slow” by most standards, and is in fact still faster than the median timelines of most experts as of 5 years ago.
Of course, one of the important facts about these past transitions is that each petered out after bootstrapping civilization far enough to start the next one that’s 10x faster. So, if the world in 2047 is 1000x richer and moving at AGI speeds compared to today, then the next 1000x change should take a few years, and the next one after that a few months. This still implies “singularity by 2050.” We’d probably have about an extra decade to ensure our survival, though, which I would agree is great.