Myles

Eli Lifland is a very smart and careful forecaster (he works with Daniel K at AIFP). Last year he thought we had until 2034 before top expert dominating AI (AI better than top human experts at everything), now he thinks we have until 2028, with automated AI research going into overdrive in 2027. All of Daniel and his colleagues, who are professional AI forecasters who predicted numbers that seemed preposterous at the time but turned out to be correct (around frontier AI company capex numbers, revenue, capability growth etc) now think we will get AIs better than humans at ~everything - systems that make current AI capabilities look impossibly archaic - by 2028. There is variation, but they also on average think that the odds of a civilization scale catastrophe or permanent human disempowerment afterwards is something like a coin flip or worse. (An aside - reading this report, and then watching the Anthropic roadshow video after made me feel physically ill - I know many of the people at Anthropic are concerned about these risks, but in this presentation they have a breezy tone that with Accenture and Claude’s constitution and other measures to prevent misuse risks they got it under control. I believe that people at AI companies owe the public far more candor than they have provided - for all the talk of them dooming, I find they are actually constantly minimizing what they privately believe.) The future is not yet written. I have a great deal of faith in the ability of people collectively to rise to the occasion (if only at the last possible moment) to protect themselves and their families. But the current trajectory we are on with AI development is truly terrifying and insane. If you would prefer to not use specific percents or numbers or look at lots of slightly made up graphs that is fine - I don't want to pretend that this is a settled science or that anyone including AIFP knows for sure what is going to happen. But at some level all they are doing is assuming that what has happened previously will continue happening for another year or two absent intervention, and when you take a detailed and precise accounting of what exactly that means the answer is epistemically violent. That doesn't mean it will happen, but it clearly means to me that taking no serious precautions or plans on that basis (urgently!) is a tremendous abdication of our collective responsibility.