Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…y strange time. One more thing that I'll just throw in there–– I think a lot of people who disagree with my take would say, “Look, I do believe eventually we will develop space colonization abilities. We could go to the stars, fill up the galaxy with life, and maybe have artificial general intelligence, but to say that this will happen in a century is crazy. I think it might be 500 years. I think it might be a thousand years. I think it might be 5000 years.” A big point I make in the series is how I say, “Well, even if it's 100000 years, that's still an extremely crazy time to be in in the scheme of things.” If you make a graphic timeline and you show my view versus yours, they look exactly the same down to the pixel. So there are already a lot of reasons to think we live in a very weird time. We're on this planet where there's no other sign of life anywhere in the galaxy. We believe that we could fill up the galaxy with life. That alone would make us among the earliest life that has ever existed in the galaxy–– a tiny fraction of it. So that’s a lot of what the series is about. I'll answer this question explicitly. You ask, “Is this series about whether transformative AI will come and make this century weird?” or is it about “This century could be weird, and therefore transformative AI will come?” The central claim is that transformative AI could be developed in this century and the sections about ‘how weird a time we live in’ are just a response to an objection. It's a response to a point of skepticism. It's a way of saying there are already a lot of reasons to think we live in a very weird time. So actually, this thing about AI is only a moderate quantitative update, not a complete revolution in the way you're thinking about things. There's a famous comedian who has a bit where he's imagining what it must have been like to live in 10BC. Let's say somebody comes with the proof that current deep learning techniques are not scalable for some reason and that transformative AI is very unlikely this century. I don't know if this is a hypothetical where that would happen, but let's just say that it is. Even if this is a weird time in terms of economic growth, does that have any implications other than transformative AI? I encourage people to go to my series because I have a bunch of charts illustrating this and it could be a little bit hard to do concisely now. But having learned about just how strange the time we live in is when you look at it in context, I think the biggest thing I take away from this is how we should really look for the next big thing. If you'd been living 300 years ago and you'd been talking about the best way to help people, a lot of people might have been talking about various forms of helping low-income people. They probably would have been talking about spreading various religious beliefs. It would have seemed crazy to think that what you should be thinking about, for example, was the steam engine and how that might change the world, but I think the Industrial Revolution was actually an enormous deal and was probably the right thing to be thinking about if there's any way to be thinking about it how that would change the world and what one might do to make that a world that could be better. So that's basically where I'm at. I just think that as a world, as a global civilization, we should place a really high priority on saying that we live in a weird time. Growth has been exploding, accelerating over the last blink of an eye. We really need to be nervous and vigilant about what comes next and think about all the things that could radically transform the world. We should make a list of all the things that might radically transform the world, make sure we've done everything we can to think about them and identify the ways we might be able to do something today that would actually help. Maybe after we're done doing all that, we can have a lot of the world's brightest minds doing their best to think of stuff and when can't think of any more, then we can go back to all the other things that we worry about Right now the world invests so little in that kind of speculative, “Hey, what's the next big thing?” Even if it's not super productive to do so, even if there's not that much to learn, I feel the world should be investing more in that because the stakes are extremely high. I think it’s a reasonable guess that we're living in a world that's recently been incredibly transformed by the Industrial Revolution and the future could be incredibly transformed by the next thing. I just don't think this gets a lot of discussion in basically any circles. If it got some, I would feel a lot more comfortable. I don't think the whole world should just obsess over what the next transformative event is, but I think right now there's so little attention to it.…

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