Summary: In the coming decades, advancements in AI will empower people to accomplish incredible things that seem magical today. This new “Intelligence Age” will provide personal AI assistants to help with tasks like education and healthcare, leading to greater prosperity for everyone. While challenges will arise, the potential benefits of AI can vastly improve lives and drive human progress.
People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible. (View Highlight)
We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. (View Highlight)
Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. (View Highlight)
Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world. (View Highlight)
Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence. (View Highlight)
To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. (View Highlight)
Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will. (View Highlight)
The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us. (View Highlight)
I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity. (View Highlight)
If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable. (View Highlight)