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You can laugh at me if we're all still alive in 2033 if the reason we're still alive is that AI safety turned out to be a nothingburger. To give a sense of how ridiculous progress has been, the start of the deep learning revolution was in 2012, 11 years ago now...
Being fair, we’re barely ten years past the start of the AI revolution. At this stage, ten years after the first private internet providers, most of the kinds of services and products based on the internet weren’t yet possible. Nobody looking at the internet as it existed in 1992 would have anticipated things like controlling you thermostat over the internet, or Amazon, or even Facebook. In fact pages with simple html and images took a minute to load.
The state of an infant technology in infancy doesn’t say anything much about its future.
People were doing online banking and shopping in 1984:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telidon
People were writing about things like an all-consuming social media internet in 1909:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
The fact that massive progress has recently happened, is continuing to happen, and now 10s billions of dollars of capital and much of the top young talent is working in an area is very strong evidence that we're going to continue to see major advances over the next decade.
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