Import AI 477: In which I tell the IMF the Singularity has begun

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Details

Here’s a speech I gave on Saturday the 17th of October at the IMF meeting in Bangkok This speech is inspired by the megatrend readers have seen me cover this year of AI beginning to operate at the frontier of human science, sometimes autonomously While we all may quibble over the details, I think it’s evident we’re in the early stages of the singularity, and I wanted to use my privileged position of giving the Per Jacobsson lecture to try and tell the assembled audience of economists, bankers, and policymakers, that they should expect significant, rapid change in the future

Context

In this speech, I focused primarily on how humanity can share in the benefits of AI if we exercise proper foresight and restraint, and I’m going to be expanding on the stakes of the singularity and the risks that we’ll all face in coming issues As I said a few times in the speech - some of which was ad libbed and not captured here - I take my own responsibility here extremely seriously

Impact

I find myself both a narrator of what is happening in AI, a principle agent behind what is happening in AI, and a translator that goes between many communities In all of this, I am seeking to be truthful and to be clear about my own culpability Speeches like this draw heavily from the newsletter, and the newsletter is my attempt to provide week-by-week information to all of you

What's Next

\\ Inside the Event Horizon: Why Everyone Should Take AI Progress Seriously Hello, thank you for having me To start, I should list my relevant credentials: I am a human being It has taken me almost 40 years to build the experience to give this speech I will come back to those credentials later My whole career has been defined by finding information that seemed important to the future of the world, then telling the world about that information.Two decades ago, I started my career as a journalist, focusing on data centers

Background

Through that work, I became so obsessed with AI that in 2016 I left journalism to work at OpenAI, then co-founded Anthropic a few years later Ever since, I’ve been trying to convince the world that one day, AI systems might become so powerful that they could alter national security, change the economic trajectory of the planet, and perhaps eventually gain the ability to build themselves

Analysis

AI is now changing national security, it is altering the economic trajectory of the world - as we’ve heard in so many sessions here - and is contributing to its own development Of course, many of you know this, and you are having to track AI as one of a multitude of destabilizing forces that is shaping your world and your work What I am here to explain today is that AI is on a course to bring about even more change than what we are expecting and we should prepare accordingly

More

For many years, researchers and science fiction authors have forecast a future in which AI systems drastically increase the pace of overall scientific and technical progress, making things move so quickly that it is hard for humans to keep up I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun The writer Vernor Vinge forecast this in 1993