Will AI Radically Change the World by 2027?

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Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Nate, today on the show is going to be a little bit doom-tastic.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's like worse than thinking about like the

global economy going into a recession because of dumb fuck tariff policies.

This is all about how we're all going to die in seven years instead.

No, I'm just kidding.

This is a very, very intelligent and well-written and thoughtful report called AI 2027 that we're going to spend the whole show on because I think it's such an interesting subject to talk about, but that, you know, includes some

dystopian possibilities, I would say.

It does indeed.

So let's get into it and hope that you guys are all still here to listen to us in seven years.

The contrast is interesting between like all the chaos we're seeing with tariff policy in terms of starting a trade war with China and then other types of chaos.

It's interesting to kind of look at this.

I mean, I wouldn't call it a more optimistic future exactly, but like but like on a different trajectory of like a future that's going to change very fast, according to these authors, with profound implications for, you know, everything, the human species.

These researchers and authors are saying that everything is going to change profoundly.

And

even though there is some

hedging here, this is kind of their base case scenario.

And like, you know, base case number one and base case number two differ.

There's like kind of a choose your own adventure at some point in this report, but they're both very different than the status quo, right?

And the notion that we hear from AIs chooses that, like everything becomes different if AIs become substantially more intelligent than human beings.

People can debate and we will debate on this program what that means.

But yeah,

do you want to contextualize this, Marie?

Do you want to tell people who the authors are of this report?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So the report is authored officially by five people, but I think unofficially there's also a sixth.

We've got Eli Leiflund, who's a super forecaster, and he was ranked first on RAND's forecasting initiative.

So he is someone who is very good at kind of looking at the future, trying to predict what's going to happen.

You have Jonas Vollmer, who's a VC at Macroscopic Ventures.

Thomas Larson was a former executive director of the Center for AI Policy.

So that is a center that advises both sides of the aisle on

how AI is going to go.

And Romeo Dean, who is part of Harvard's AI safety student team.

So someone who is still a student, still learning, but kind of the next generation of people looking at AI.

And finally, we have Daniel Coctelo, who basically had written a report back in 2021.

He was a AI researcher, and he looked at predictions for AI for 2026.

And it turns out that his predictions were pretty spot on.

And so OpenAI actually hired Daniel as a result of this report.

Previously, he's now left angry.

Yes.

And then he left.

Exactly.

And importantly,

there's also Scott Alexander.

Exactly.

So I was saying he's the person who kind of is in the background.

And

you guys might know him as the author behind Astral Codex.

And I know Scott.

He's one of the kind of fathers of

what you might call rationalism.

I think Scott, when I interviewed him for my book, was happy enough with that term and accused me or co-opted me into also being a rationalist.

These people are somewhat adjacent to the effective altruist, but not quite, right?

They're just trying to apply a sort of thoughtful, rigorous, quantitative lens to big picture problems, including existential risk, of which most people in this community believe that AI is both an existential risk and also kind of an existential opportunity, right?

That it could transform things.

You talk to Sam Altman, he'll say, we're going to cure cancer and eliminate poverty and whatever else, right?

And Scott's also an excellent writer.

And so let me disclose something which is slightly important here.

So I actually was approached by some of the authors of this report a couple of months ago, I guess it was in February-ish,

just to give feedback and chat with them.

So I'm working off the draft version, right?

Which I do not believe they changed very much.

So my notes pertain to an earlier draft.

I did not have time this morning to go back and reread it.

So I have, I was not on the inside loop, so I did not get an earlier draft.

And I've read this draft.

And basically, just to kind of big picture, sum it up,

it outlines two scenarios, right?

Two major scenarios for how AI might change the world as soon as 2030.

Now, important note, like

that date is kind of hedged.

It might be sooner, it might be later.

There's a confidence interval there.

But the two different scenarios, one, basically, p doom, 2030, humanity disappears and is taken over by AI.

The positive report is in 2030, basically we get AIs that are aligned to our interests and we get kind of this AI utopia where AIs actually help make life much better for everyone and make the standard of living much higher.

But the crucial turning point is before 2030.

And the crucial kind of question at the center of this is

will

we be able to design AIs that are truly aligned to human interests rather than just appear to be aligned and kind of lying to us while actually following their own agenda.

And how we handle that is kind of the linchpin.

And it's actually interesting, Nate, that you started out with China because a lot of the policy choices and a lot of what they see as kind of the decision points that will affect the future of humanity actually

hinge on the US-China dynamic, how they compete with each other, and how that sometimes might basically clash against safety concerns because no one wants to be left behind.

Can we manage that effectively?

And can kind of that transition work in in our favor as opposed to against us?

I think that this is kind of one of the big questions here.

And so it's funny that we're seeing all of this trade war right now as this report is coming out.

Yeah, look, I think this exercise is

partly just a forecasting exercise.

I mean, obviously there's this kind of like...

fork at the bottom where we learn to have an AI slowdown or we kind of are pressing fully on the accelerator, right?

Like in some ways, scenarios are like not

that different, right?

Either one assumes

remarkable rates of technological growth that I think even AI, I'm never quite sure who to call an optimist or a pessimist, right?

Even AI believers

might think is a little bit aggressive, right?

But what they want to do is they want to have like a

specific fleshed out scenario for how the world would look like.

It's kind of like a modal scenario.

And like, I think they'd say that like,

we're not totally sure about either of these necessarily, right?

And I don't think they'd be as like pedantic as to say, if you do X, Y, and Z, then

we'll save the world and have utopia.

And if you don't, then we'll all die, right?

I think they probably say it's unclear, and there's kind of like risk either way.

And we wanted to go through the scenario of like fleshing out like what the world might look like, right?

I do think one thing that's important is that whatever decisions are made

now

could get locked in, right?

That you pass certain points in overturn

and it becomes very hard to decelerate like an arms race.

This is what we found during the Cold War, for example.

I mean, one of the big things I look at is like, do we force the AI to be transparent in its thinking with humans, right?

Like now, there's been a movement toward the AI will actually explicate its thinking more.

I'll ask it a query, OpenAI.

The Chinese models do this too, right?

And they'll say, I am thinking about X, Y, and Z, and I'm looking up P D and Q, and now I'm reconsidering this.

It actually has this chain of thought process, right?

Which is explicated in English.

You know, one concern is that, what if the AI just kind of communicates to one another

in these implicit vectors that it's inferring from all the text it has?

It's kind of unintelligible to human beings, right?

And maybe kind of quote unquote thinking in that way in the first place, and then does us the favor of like translating back, so it goes from English to kind of this big bag of numbers, as one AI researcher called it, right?

And then it translates it back into English or whatever language you want, really, in the end.

What if it just cuts out that last step, right?

Then we can't kind of like check what AI is doing, then it can behave deceptively more easily.

So, you know, so that part seems to be important.

I want to hear your

first impressions before I kind of poison the well too much.

Well, my first impressions is that the alignment problem is a very real one and an incredibly important one to solve.

And what I got from this is that actually the problem that I've had with like these initial AI LLMs is the kernel of what they're seeing there.

So you and I have talked about this on the show in the past and I've said, well, my problem is that when I'm a domain expert, right, I start seeing some inaccuracies and I start seeing like places where like it either just didn't do well or made shit up or whatever it is.

Now, I think it's very very clear that those problems are going to go away, right?

That that is going to get much, much better.

However, the kernel of it's showing me something, but that might just be, you know, I have no way of verifying if that's what's going on, what it's reading, like how it's, I don't want to say thinking about it, even though in the report they do use thinking, but it's

correct.

I think it's okay.

We'll stick to that language.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, um, so how it's thinking about it, um,

that those little problems and like the little the glitches and the things that it might be doing where it starts actually glitching on purpose are not going to be visible to the human eye.

And so one of the main things that they say here is that as AI internal R and D gets rapidly faster.

So that means basically AI is researching AIs, right?

And so internally they start developing new models.

And as they kind of surpass human ability to monitor it, it becomes progressively more difficult to figure out, okay, is the AI actually doing what I want it to do?

Is the output that it's giving me its actual thought process?

And is it accurate or is it like trying to deceive me, but it's actually kind of inserting certain things on purpose because it has different goals, right?

Because it is actually secretly misaligned, but it's very good at persuading me that it's aligned.

Because one of the things that actually came out of this report, and I was like, huh, you know, this is interesting, is if we get this

remarkable improvement in AI, it will also remarkably improve at persuading us, right?

See, this part I don't buy.

This is one part I don't buy.

Yeah, so this is, this is, but I'd never even thought about that.

I was like, okay, fine.

But one of the things that I do buy is that it's going to be very difficult for us to monitor it and to figure out, like, is it truly aligned with human wants, with human desires, with human goals?

And the experts who are capable of doing that, I think are actually going to dwindle, right, as AI starts proliferating in society.

And so to me, that is something that is actually quite worrisome.

And that is something that we really need to be paying attention to.

Now, just to fast forward a little bit.

In their doomsday scenario, in 2031, AI takes over.

It basically like suddenly releases some chemical agents, right?

And humanity dies and the rest of the stragglers are taken care of by drones, et cetera.

I don't even like

it.

It's a quick and painless death, I will say, on the fastest.

Let's hope.

We don't know what the chemical agents are.

It might not be quick and painless.

Some chemical agents are actually a very painful death mate.

So let's hope.

Let's hope it's quick and painless.

Quick and quick.

Quick.

Yes, quick.

Okay, hopefully.

Some chemical agents are not quick.

Let's hope it's quick and painless.

But if they're actually capable of deception at that high level, then you technically don't even need them to do it.

If we're trusting medicine and all sorts of things to the AIs, it's pretty easy for it to actually manipulate something and actually insert something into codes, et cetera, that will fuck up humanity in a way that

we can't actually.

figure out at the moment, right?

Like the way I think of it, and

this is not from the paper, but this is just the way that like my mind processed it, is like, think about DNA, right?

Like you have these remarkably complex, huge strands of data.

And as we've found out, but it's taken forever, one tiny mutation can actually be fatal, right?

But you can't spot that mutation.

Sometimes that mutation isn't fatal immediately, but will only manifest at a certain point in time.

That's the way that my mind tried to kind of try to conceptualize what this actually means.

And so I think that, you know, that would be easy for a deceptive AI to do.

And to me, like that's kind of the big takeaway from this report is that we need to make sure that we are building AIs that will not deceive, right?

That their

capabilities, they explain them in an honest way, and that honesty and trust is actually prioritized over other things, even though it might slow down research, it might slow down other things, but that that kind of alignment step is absolutely crucial at the beginning, because otherwise humans are human, right?

They're easily manipulated.

And we often trust that computers are quote unquote rational because they're computers, but they're not.

They have their own inputs, they have their own weights, they have their own values, and

that could just lead us down a dark path.

Yeah, so let me follow up with this pushback, I guess, right?

Like, first of all, I don't know that humans are so easily persuaded.

This is my big critique with like all the

misinformation people who say, well, misinformation is the biggest problem that society faces.

It's like people are actually pretty stubborn and they're kind of to sound pretentious.

They're kind of Bayesian in how they formulate their beliefs, right?

They have some notion of reality.

They're looking at the credibility of

the person who is telling them these remarks.

If it's an unpersuasive source, it might make them less likely to believe.

They're balancing with other information with their lived experience, so-called, right?

You know, part of the reason that I I am skeptical of AIs being super persuasive is like,

you know, that it's an AI and you know it's trying to persuade you, you know what I mean?

So like if you go and play poker against like a really chatty player, Phil Hemuth or Scott Sieber or someone like that, right?

You know on some level that the best play is just to totally ignore it, right?

You know that they are trying to sweet talk you into doing exactly what they want you to do.

And so the best play is disengage or literally you can randomize your movies if you have some some notion of what the game theoretical optimal play might be, right?

Or salesmen or politicians have reputations for being, oh, he's a little too smooth.

Gavin Newsom, a little too fucking smooth, right?

I don't find Gavin Newsome persuasive at all, right?

He's a little too from the hair gel to the constantly shifting vibes.

I mean, I don't really find Gavin Newsom persuasive at all, even though like in AI, I'd say, boy, Gavin Newsome's a good looking guy.

He's a little gravel-throated, but, you know, whatever.

I mean, look, the big critique I have of this project, and by the way, I think this is an amazing project.

In addition to like wonderful writing, if you view it on the web, not your phone, because these very cool, like little infographic that updates everything from like the market value of, they don't call it open AI, they call it open brain.

I guess is what they settle on for a substitute right now.

Yeah, they call everything something else just to make sure that they're not stepping on any toes.

So they have open brain and then they have deep scent from China.

I wonder which one that could be.

I wonder.

But it's beautifully presented and written.

And like, I appreciate their going out on

a limb here.

You know, I mean, I think they have got, it's been fairly well received.

They've gotten some pushback both from inside and I think outside the AI safety community, right?

But they're putting their necks in the line here.

They will look if we if if things look pretty normal, if the world looks pretty normal in 2032 or whatever, right, then they will look

dumb for having published this.

Well, and and they actually actually have that right as a scenario that you end up looking stupid if everything goes well, but that's okay.

Now, can I push back on the persuasion thing a little bit?

Um, just on two, two things.

So, first of all, the poker example is not actually a particularly applicable one here because you know that you're playing poker and you know that someone is trying to get information and deceive you.

The tricky thing, so this is kind of when I spent time with con artists, the best con artists aren't Gavin Newsom.

Like, they're not car salesmen.

You have no idea they're trying to persuade you to do something.

They are just like nice, affable people who are incredibly charismatic.

And even in the poker community, by the way, like some of the biggest grifters who like it comes out later on were just like stealing money and doing all of these things are charming, right?

They're not sleazy looking.

Like they have no signs of, oh, I'm a salesman.

I'm trying to sell you something.

The people who are actually good at persuasion, you do not realize you're being persuaded.

And I think people are incredibly easy to kind of to subtly lead in a certain direction if you know how to do it.

And I think AIs could could do that.

And they might persuade you when you don't even think they're trying to persuade you.

You might just ask, like, can you please summarize this research report?

And the way that it frames it, right?

The way that it summarizes it just subtly changes the way that you think of this issue.

We see that in psych studies all the time, by the way, where you have different articles presented in slightly different order, slightly different ways, and people from the same political beliefs, you know, same starting point, come away with different impressions of what kind of the right course of action is or what this is actually trying to tell you, because the way the information is presented actually influences how you think about it.

It's very, very easy to do subtle manipulations like that.

And if we're relying on AI on a large scale for a lot of our lives, I think that if it has like a quote-unquote master plan, you know, the way that they present in this report, then persuasion in that sense is actually going to be

you'll know you're being manipulated, right?

That's, that's the issue.

No, you don't.

No, that's the thing you've been

manipulated

because it's AI and I don't, but.

I don't know.

I honestly, like, Nate, I applaud your belief in humans' ability to adjust to this, but I don't know that they will because I've just seen enough people who are incredibly intelligent fall for cons and then be very unpersuadable that they have been conned, right?

Instead doubling down and saying, no, I have not.

So humans are stubborn, but they're also stubborn in saying, I have not been deceived.

I have not been manipulated when in fact they have, to protect their ego and to protect their view of themselves as people who are not capable of being manipulated or deceived.

And I think that that is incredibly powerful.

And I think that that's going to push against your optimism.

I hope you're right, but from what I know, I don't think you are.

I'm not quite sure I call it optimism.

So I guess maybe we do like slightly different views of human nature, but like there's not yet a substantial market for like AI-driven art or writing.

And I'm sure there will be one eventually, right?

But like people understand that context matters, right?

That you could, hey, I created a rip off of Mona Lisa, but you can also buy a rip off the Mona Lisa on Canal Street for five bucks, right?

And like it did, you know.

So it's the, it's the intentionality of the act and the context of the speaker.

Now I sound like super woke, I guess, right?

Like Like where you're coming from in your library sphere.

I think that actually is how humans communicate.

Like art that might be pointless dribble coming from somebody can be something different coming from a Jackson Bollock or whatever.

You know, absolutely.

I think that that's a really important point, by the way.

I think it's a different point, but I think that that is a very important point.

I think context does matter.

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I was buttering up this report before.

My big critique of it is: where are the human beings in this are put in another way, kind of like, where is the politics, right?

They're trying not to use any remotely controversial real names, right?

So you have open brain, for example.

So where is President Trump?

Let me just do a quick search to make sure the name Trump does not appear to know the name of the Trump.

So they do actually, I don't know if this existed.

Maybe they took your criticism in this, but they do have like the vice president and the president.

Like they do put politicians in this version of the report.

They don't have names, but they say the vice president in one of these scenarios, you know, handily wins the election of 2028.

We have one vice president.

They have general secretary, I think.

I'm not sure if they, I mean.

General Secretary.

General Secretary resembles she.

Yep.

And the vice president kind of resembles.

JD Vance, right?

I don't think the president resembles Trump at all, right?

It's kind of this tempologist

character.

Yeah, they tried to sidestep that as well.

If we think this is all happening in the next four years, then,

you know, presidential politics matter quite a bit.

I mean, I don't know.

This is such a fucking, you know,

I was jogging earlier on the East Side and I was listening to the Ezra Klein interview with Thomas Friedman.

It's such a fucking yuppie fucking thing, right?

It's okay.

It's okay.

You're allowed to be a yupper.

Mr.

Friedman, I'm like,

not a huge fan of necessarily, but like, you know, is well versed on like geopolitics and like China issues.

He's like, yeah, China, he's just been back from China.

He's like, yeah, China's kind of winning.

You know what I mean?

And like, I'm not sure.

How Trump's hawkishness on China, but like kind of

imbecilically executed.

hawkishness on China.

Like, I'm not sure how that figures in to this, right?

If we are reducing U.S.-China trade, that probably does produce an AI slowdown, maybe more for us if we're like, if they're not exporting their raw earth materials and so forth, but we're making it harder for them to get NVIDIA chips, so they probably have lots of workarounds and things like that.

Maybe Trump's tariffs are good.

I'd like to ask the authors this report because it means that we're going to have slower AI progress.

And I'm not joking, right?

On the other hand, it increases the hostility between the U.S.

and China in the long run, right?

I mean, that's that if we were sending all the tariffs tomorrow, I think we still permanently, or let's not say permanently, let's say at least for a decade or so, have injured U.S.

standing in the world.

And so, I don't know how that figures in.

And I'm like, I'm also not sure, like,

kind of quote, what the rational response might be.

But one thing they tracked, let me make sure that they kept this into their report, right?

So they actually have

their implied approval rating for

how people feel about open brain, which is their

not very substantial

feature for open AI.

I think this actually is some feedback

that they took into account, right?

They originally had it slightly less negative, but they have this being persistently negative and then getting more negative over time.

It was a little softer

in the previous version that I saw.

So they did change that one thing

at some stage.

But like the fact that AI scares people, it scares people for

both good and bad reasons, but I think mostly for valid reasons, right?

That the fear is fairly bipartisan, that the biggest AI accelerators are now these kind of Republican techno-optimists who are not looking particularly wise given how it's going with the first 90 days, whatever we are, the Trump administration, and the

likelihood of like a substantial political backlash, right?

Which could lead to dumb types of regulations.

But like, you know, part of it too is like, okay,

AI, they're saying, can do not just computer desk jobs, but like all types of things, right?

And like humans kind of play this role initially as supervisors.

And then literally within a couple of years, people start to say, you know what, am I really adding much

value here, right?

You kind of have like these legacy jobs, and there is a lot of money.

I think most of these scenarios imagine

very fast economic growth, although maybe very lumpy, right?

For some parts of the world and not others.

But we're kind of just sitting around with a lot of idle time.

It might be good for live poker, Maria, right?

All of a sudden, all these smart people, their open earth or open brain, excuse me, stock is now worth billions of dollars, right?

And like

nothing to do because the AI is doing all their work, right?

They have a lot of fucking time to play some fucking Texas holding, right?

That is one way of thinking about it.

Let's go back to

your earlier point, which I actually think is an important one, because obviously they were trying to do, as all super forecasting tries to do, is you try to create a report that will work in multiple scenarios, right?

You can't tie it too much to like the present moment, otherwise your forecasts are going to be quite biased.

However, I do think that what you raise, kind of our current situation with China, et cetera, has very real implications given that this is kind of the central dynamic of this report that their predictions are based on.

I think that it's incredibly valid to actually speculate, you know, how will, if at all, this affect the timeline of the predictions, the possible, the likelihood of the two scenarios.

And I will also say that one of the things in the report is that all of these negotiations on like, will we slow down?

Will we not?

How aligned is it, this all takes place in secret, right?

Like we don't know.

We, the humans, don't know that it's going on.

We don't know what's happening behind the scenes.

And we don't know what the decision makers are kind of thinking.

And so, for all we know, you know, President Trump is meeting with Sam Altman and

trying to kind of do some of these things.

And it's funny because we were kind of pushing for transparency in one way, but there's a lot of things here that are very much not transparent.

Yeah, it's kind of the deep state, right?

But also,

a lot of the negotiations are now AI versus AI, right?

And

look, I'm not sure that AIs will have that trust both with the external actor and internally.

I'm skeptical of that, right?

If that does happen,

they kind of think this might be good because the AIs will probably behave in like a literally game theory

optimal way, right?

And understand these things and make, I guess, like fewer mistakes than

humans might.

If they're properly aligned, like that's a crucial thing, because in the doomsday scenario, AI um negotiates with ai but they conspire to destroy humanity right so there are two scenarios one it's actually properly aligned so ai negotiates with ai game theory um works out and we end up with you know democracy and wonderful things but in the other one where they're misaligned ai negotiates with ai to create a new ai basically and um destroy humanity so so it can go one way or the other depending on that alignment step first of all

i mean, the utopia didn't seem that utopian to me, right?

I'm not sure that no, it didn't.

It actually seemed quite dystopian to me.

Like it seemed incredibly dystopian.

It's kind of like I, you know, I, but at least we're still alive.

We'll have adventures.

We'll probably live longer.

And again,

lots of, lots of, lots of poker.

The AI will be writing Silver Bulletin and

hosting our podcast, right?

Let me back up a little bit because I think we maybe take for granted that some of these premises are kind of controversial, right?

So they they have a breakpoint, I think, in 2026.

Well, it says,

why aren't certain increases potentially beyond 2026, right?

So that's kind of the breakpoint.

It's like 27 is an inflection point.

I think I'm using that term correctly in this context.

You know, so I'm reading this report and

up to 2026.

I'm like, thumbs up, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This seems like very smart and detailed about like,

you know, how the economy is reacting and how politics are reacting and the race dynamic with China.

Maybe there needs to be a little bit more Trump in there.

I understand why politically they didn't want to get into that mess, right?

But like,

so there's kind of three different things here, right?

One is a notion of what's sometimes called AGI or artificial general intelligence.

And if you asked a hundred different researchers, you'd get a hundred different definitions of what AGI is.

But you know, I think it is basically like being able to do a large majority of things that a human being could do competently, assuming we're limiting it to kind of like desk job type tasks, right?

Anything that can be done remotely is sometimes definition that is used or through remote work, right?

Because clearly AIs are inferior to humans in like

sorting and folding laundry or things like that, right?

That requires a certain type of intelligence, right?

If you use the kind of desk job definition, then like

AI is already pretty close to AGI, right?

I use large language models all the freaking time and they're not perfect for everything.

I felt like, you know, in terms of like being able to do the large majority of desk work

at levels ranging from competent intern to super genius, like on average, it's probably pretty close to being generally intelligent by that definition, right?

If you're the one using it, I just want to like once again point that out because one of the things that they say in the report is that as it gets more and more involved, what we're asking AI to do, it's like the human process to evaluate whether it's accurate and whether it's making mistakes will get longer and longer.

And I think they say like for every like basically one day of work, it'll take several,

it's like a two-to-one ratio at the beginning for how long it will take humans to verify the output, right?

So you think, like you think you save time by having AI do this, but if you want it to actually develop correctly, then you need a team and it takes them twice as long to verify that what the AI did is actually true and actually valid and actually aligned, et cetera, et cetera.

Now you're not asking it to do things that require that amount of time, but there do need to be little caveats to how we, how we think about their usefulness and how you are able to evaluate the output versus other scenarios.

When I use AI, the things that it's best with are things that like save me time, right?

Where I feeded a bunch of different names for different college basketball teams.

We worked in our NCA model.

I'm like, take these seven different naming conventions that are all different and

create a cross-reference table of these, which is kind of like a hard task, right?

You need to have a little context about basketball, and

it did that very well, right?

That's something I could have done.

It might have taken an hour or two, but you know, instead,

instead, I could do it in a few minutes, and it gets faster.

It's like, oh, I've learned from this, from you before, Nate, so now I can be faster doing this type of task in the future.

I was at the poker tournament down in Florida last week, and like,

you know, I asked open research, excuse me, God, is that like,

see, exactly, right?

It It all becomes

deep research.

Deep research,

deep research.

I asked deep research.

Reading too many of these 2027 reports, your brain gets to pull a bunch of stock market data for me, and then I'm playing at poker hand, and like I make a

really thin, sexy value bet with like fourth pair.

No one knows that means, right?

I bet a very weak hand because I thought the other guy would call with an even weaker hand.

And I was right.

And I feel like I'm such a fucking stud here, value betting fourth pair.

And while AI does the work for me, and then, of course, I like bust out of the tournament an hour later.

And meanwhile, you know, deep research bungles this particular task.

But in general, AI has been very reliable.

But the point is that

there's like a inflection point where like I'm asking it to do things that like are just a faster version of what I could do myself.

I wouldn't, at the moment, I ask AI be like, how about you design a new NCA model for me with these parameters?

Because like, I wouldn't know how to test it.

Anyway, I'm being long-winded here.

So AGI, we're going to get AGI, or at least we're going to get someone calling something AGI soon.

AGI, right?

Artificial superintelligence, where it's doing things much better than human beings.

I think this report takes for granted, or not takes for granted, it has lots of documentation about its assumptions, but it's saying, okay, this trajectory has been very robust so far, and people make all types of bullshit predictions.

So the fact that these guys in particular have made accurate predictions in the past is certainly worth something, I think, right?

But they're like, okay, you kind of follow the scaling law, and

before too much longer,

you know, AI starts to be more intelligent than human beings.

You can debate what intelligent means if you want, but do superhuman types of things or and/or do them very fast, which I think might be different, right?

And AI can do things very fast, is

maybe it's certainly a component of intelligence, right?

But like, but I don't take for granted that like

quote-unquote AI can reliably extrapolate beyond the data set.

I just think that like, it's not an absurd leap of logic.

It may even be like the base case or close to the base case, but like that's not assumable from first principles, I don't think.

We've all seen lots of trend charts of the, you know, if you look at a chart of Japan's GDP in the 1980s, you might have said, okay, well, Japan's going to take over the world and be and people bought this.

And now this economy hasn't grown for like 40 years basically right and so like we've all seen lots of curves that go up and then it's actually an escrow whatever the fuck you call it where like it begins to to bend the other way at some point and we can't tell until later right the other thing is like the um

ability of ai to plan and manipulate the physical world i mean some of these things where they're talking about like you know brain uploading and Dyson swarms and nanobots, like, you know, there, I would literally

wager money against this happening on the time scales that they're talking

about, right?

They double the time scale.

Okay, then I might start to give some more probability.

And look, I'm willing to be wrong about that.

I guess we're all being dead anyway, 50% likelihood in this scenario.

But like,

this scenario, 50%.

Like, a, you know, the physical world requires sensory input and lots of parts of our brain that AI is not as effective at manipulating.

It also requires like being given or commandeering resources somehow.

by the way this is like a little bit of a a

problem

for the united state i mean we are behind china by like

quite a bit in robotics and related things right so like i don't know what happens if like we have the brainier smarter ais but like they're very good at manufacturing and machinery so like what if we have the brains and they have the

brawn, so to speak, right?

And they have maybe a more

authoritarian but functional infrastructure.

So I don't know what happens then, right?

Like, but the ability of AIs to commandeer resources to control the physical world, to me, seems far-fetched on these timelines, in part because of politics, right?

I mean, the fact that it takes so long to build a new building in the U.S.

or a new subway station or a new highway,

and the fact that our politics is kind of sclerotic, right?

And look, I mean, I don't want to sound like

too pessimistic, but if you read the book I recommended last week, Fight, I mean, we basically did not have a fully competent president for the last two years.

And I would argue that we don't have one for the next four years, right?

So, like, all these kind of things that we have to plan for.

Like, who's doing that fucking planning?

Our government's kind of dysfunctional.

And, you know, maybe that means we just lose to China, right?

Maybe that means we lose to China.

At least we'll have like nice cars, I guess.

We'll be back right after this.

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I think that your point about the growth trajectories not necessarily being reliable is a very valid one.

The Japanic example is great.

You know, Malthusian population growth is

another big one, right?

We thought that population would explode, and instead we're actually seeing population decline.

So, you know, the world does change.

The thing that I think they rely on is that the AIs are capable of designing just this incredible technology much more quickly so that our building process and all of that gets sped up 100 fold from what it is right now.

But it still, at least at this point, needs humans to implement it, right?

And needs all of these different workers.

And so, yeah, I think there are some assumptions built into here that I hope, like, I hope that that timeline isn't feasible.

And I do think that there are things that are holding us back.

All the same, I think it's really, I think it's interesting.

One of the reasons I like like this report is that it forces you to think about these things, right?

And try to game out some of these worst case scenarios to try to prevent them,

which I think is always an important thought exercise.

I do want to go back to kind of their good scenario, which just, so bad scenario is, you know, we're all wiped out by

a chemical warfare that the AIs release on us.

Good scenario is that, you know, everyone gets a universal basic income and AI does everything and no one has to do anything and we can just live

happy with Maria.

Play poker.

Yeah.

And that just, as you suggested, that seems actually like a very dystopian scenario where people can become much more easy to brainwash, control, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like a dumbing town, right?

Where we're not challenged to produce good art, to advance in any sort of way.

It just, to me, it does not seem like a very meaningful thing.

Well, I mean, the question is, there's other ways, if you read AI 2027, which I highly recommend that you read it, there's also another post by a pseudonymous poster called L.

Rudolph L., who wrote something called A History of the Future, 2025 to 2040,

which is very detailed, but goes through kind of like what this looks like at like more of a human level, how society evolves,

how the economy evolves, how work evolves, right?

And like very detailed, just like AI 2027 is, but kind of focuses on the parts of AI 27 that I think it kind of deliberately ignores, maybe you can call them mild blind spots or whatever, right?

But like, but that's interesting, because that kind of thinks about like what types of jobs are there in the future?

There are probably lots of lawyers, actually, right?

Because, you know, the law is very sluggish to change, especially in a constitutional system where there are lots of veto points, right?

Probably high-end service sector.

You know, you go to a restaurant because everyone's, or a lot of people are rich now, right?

And you're flattered by the attractive young server and things like that.

So it's kind of highly kind of like catered and curated experiences.

I guess I have

some faith in humanity's ability to fight back, quote unquote, against like

two scenarios that it might not really like either one.

You know what I mean?

And like the scenario where like AI is producing like 10%

GDP growth or whatever, right?

I mean, it's great if you own stocks that are exposed exposed to AI and tech companies, probably right.

But it's also making that money on the backs of mass job displacement.

And like, you know, economists are confident in the long run that human beings find productive things to do.

And,

you know, mass unemployment has been predicted many times and never really occurred, right?

But like, but it's not occurring this fast where they think.

the world ends in six years or whatever they're predicting or we have utopia in six years and like just the ability of like human society to like deal with that change at these time scales leads to like more chaos than I think they're more predicting.

But I think also, and I told them this too, right?

I think also leads to more constraints, right?

That you hit bottlenecks.

If you have five things you have to do, right?

And you have the world's fastest computer, et cetera, et cetera, but there's like a power outage in your neighborhood, right?

Then that's a...

That's a bottleneck, right?

Maybe there are ways around it.

You're going to go to Home Depot and buy a generator or, you know what i mean but like but the point is that like you're often defined by like the slowest link and and politics are sometimes the slowest link but also by like also you know i think the report um

maybe understates and i think kind of in general the ai safety community like maybe understates the ability of like human beings to cause harm to other human beings with ai right that concern kind of gets brushed off as like too pedestrian or like

I was going to say too pedestrian

the exact word I was thinking of I think that's a good, I mean, I think that's a great place to end it because, um, yes, we do need to be concerned about all of these things about AI, but like that, that phrase I think is very crucial.

Like, do not underestimate the ability of humans to cause harm to other humans.

And I think that that's,

you know, it's not a very optimist, it's not a very pleasant place to end, but I think it's a really important place to end.

And I think that that's a very valid kind of way of reflecting on this nature.

Or to trust AIs too much, right?

I generally think that concern is like

somewhat misplaced, but like if we're handing over critical systems to AI, right,

it can cause problems if it's very smart and deceives us and doesn't like us very much.

It can also cause problems if it has

hallucinations.

bugs in critical areas where it isn't as robust and hasn't really been tested yet that are outside of its domain.

Or there could be espionage.

Anyway, we will have plenty of time, although maybe only seven more years actually, to like explore

these scenarios.

Yes.

And in seven years, we'll be like, welcome back to the final episode of Risky Business because the prediction is we're all going to be dead tomorrow.

But yeah, this was an interesting exercise.

And I think my p-doom has slightly gone up as a result of reading this, but I also remain optimistic that humans can do good as well as harm.

Yeah, my interest in learning Chinese has increased as a result of recent developments.

I don't know about my P-Doom.

All right, yeah,

let's do some language immersion.

I'm with you.

That's it for today.

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