Questions about the Future of AI - Readwise Highlights

Metadata

Author: Dwarkesh Patel
Full Title: Questions about the Future of AI
Category: articles
Summary: The blog post discusses the future of AI, exploring its capabilities, economic impact, and potential transformations in society. It raises questions about how AI will integrate into workflows and its role in automating labor. The author also considers the challenges and implications of achieving advanced AI, including the risks of centralization and the pace of progress.
URL: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/questions-about-ai

Replicating capabilities derived from a billion years of evolutionary optimization might take much longer than replicating skills contingent on a hundred thousand years of optimization. (View Highlight)
Between 1859 (when Drake first discovered oil in Pennsylvania), to 1908 (when Henry Ford invented the modern automobile), the main use for crude was as kerosene for lighting. (View Highlight)
a general upgrading of your society’s tech stack is more important than raw cognitive effort in a specific sector: you couldn’t have discovered the structure of DNA without X-ray crystallography; and we didn’t figure out there was a Big Bang until we saw cosmic background microwave thanks to the radio astronomy techniques that were initially developed for communications during World War II. (View Highlight)

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Capabilities

Agency
- Moravec’s paradox
- “Moore’s Law for AI agents”: the length of tasks that AIs can do is doubling about every 7 months.
RL
Idiot savants
New training techniques
Pre-training Economics
Early deployment
Coding and remote work
Open source
Model training and value capture
Investment
Hardware Post-AGI
Hive minds
Software only singularity
Transformative AI
Explosive economic growth Alignment
Reward hacking
Takeover
Model spec
Misuse Other
Geopolitics
Epistemics

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