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Notes -
Is there a community that has out performed rationalists in forecasting AI? Scott's own 2018 forecast of AI in 2023 was pretty good, wasn't it??
I have roughly two thoughts here:
Firstly, I don't think that's a very substantial forecast. Those are very safe predictions largely amounting to "things in 2023 will be much the same as in 2018". The predictions he got correct were that a computer would beat a top player at Starcraft (AlphaStar did that in 2018), that MIRI would still exist in 2023 (not actually about AI), and about the 'subjective feelings' around AI risk (still not actually about AI). These are pretty weak tea. Would you rate him as correct or incorrect on self-driving cars? I believe there have been a couple of experimental schemes in very limited areas, but none that have been very successful. I would take his prediction to imply coverage of an entire city and for the cars to be useable by ordinary people not specially interested in tech.
Secondly, I feel like predictions like that are a kind of motte and bailey? Predicting that language models will get better over the next few years is a pretty easy call. "Technology will continue to incrementally improve" is a safe bet. However, that's not really the controversial issue. AI risk or AI safety has been heavily singularitarian in its outlook - we're talking about MIRI, née the Singularity Institute, aren't we? AGI, superintelligence, the intelligence explosion, and so on. It's a big leap from the claim that existing technologies will get better to, as Arjin put it, AGI "achieving total control of humanity's minds and souls".
Being right about autonomous driving technology gradually improving or text predictors getting a bit faster doesn't seem like it translates to reliability in forecasting AI-god.
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