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Notes -
AI 2040: Plan A
The AI 2027 authors published a follow-up. Scott Alexander also wrote a separate blogpost and although not in the author list contributed.
It's a very speculative and optimistic timeline of AI's future evolution. It presents five ways or "plans" the US government will intervene. Unsurprisingly, the ASI-pilled authors favor strong, global regulation to ensure alignment. Summaries:
Plan A (recommended): the US makes an international treaty with China, pauses AI training (not inference, i.e. no new models but we keep using existing ones), enforces full transparency of future research, then when alignment research advances enough carefully resumes
Plan S: the US makes an international treaty with China and pauses AI training for as long as possible
Plan B: the US regulates AI at home and demands China also regulate, but doesn't negotiate with them, probably leading to a war
Plan C: the US regulates AI and ignores China, so they overtake it and reach ASI first
Plan D: the US doesn't regulate AI, we get ASI in early 2031 and it probably kills everyone
Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.
I think politicians will prioritize culture war and the failing economy over AI regulation, and at most pass some executive orders suggesting companies be more careful. But I also doubt we'll have ASI that can solve the abstract problems "take over the world" or even "keep existing world leaders in power" (they're getting old and increasingly unpopular, their parties may remain in power but only if their policies significantly shift).
What I expect from AI:
Basically solve legacy code by rewriting entire codebases, applying very niche domain knowledge, and actually finding and handling edge-cases better than humans
Greatly speedup research, leading to new discoveries and inventions. Important but background things like food preservation and medicine will improve from AI-assisted discoveries. Major advancements in math and theoretical physics
Much better and cheaper education, therapy, initial medical/legal appointments, personal repairs...maybe reducing but not eliminating human jobs, because human experts will offer these services "premium"
Won't replace human artists. Some advertisements and infographics will be AI but even some will still be human. At best it will assist them in a way where the human still fully controls the output, e.g. by generating code leading to new and improved software tools to learn, practice, and create art
Used by the vast majority as a personal assistant, but doesn't replace human relations
Scattered thoughts on this:
Its fun to speculate on but I'm not sure that a having a counterfactual KMT led China would have turned out any better for the US. Probably, but a rivalry seems somewhat overdetermined. China is big, the US is big, there is bound to be at least tension.
KMT was pretty extreme in its own right. They considered themselves a revolutionary party, they had the same "century of humiliation" resentments against the West, they were ran by a warlord. Chiang Kaishek does not exactly strike me as a liberal democracy enjoyer:
China really shot itself in the foot with the Mao led CCP. If that huge China takeoff happens in 1980 or 70 or 60 instead of 1990, where do you think China would be today? If they had the same GDP per capita as Taiwan does now their GDP would be 2x the US. Think of the consternation caused by Japan Inc. in the 80s, and that was with about as close of an ally as you can get. Yes Tawian / US are close now, but that is a vassal / big bro relationship, not peer/peer.
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