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Tom Davidson on How Quickly AI Could Automate the Economy

Published
8 September, 2023
Video

Tom Davidson joins the podcast to discuss how AI could quickly automate most cognitive tasks, including AI research, and why this would be risky.

Timestamps:
00:00 The current pace of AI
03:58 Near-term risks from AI
09:34 Historical analogies to AI
13:58 AI benchmarks VS economic impact
18:30 AI takeoff speed and bottlenecks
31:09 Tom's model of AI takeoff speed
36:21 How AI could automate AI research
41:49 Bottlenecks to AI automating AI hardware
46:15 How much of AI research is automated now?
48:26 From 20% to 100% automation
53:24 AI takeoff in 3 years
1:09:15 Economic impacts of fast AI takeoff
1:12:51 Bottlenecks slowing AI takeoff
1:20:06 Does the market predict a fast AI takeoff?
1:25:39 "Hard to avoid AGI by 2060"
1:27:22 Risks from AI over the next 20 years
1:31:43 AI progress without more compute
1:44:01 What if AI models fail safety evaluations?
1:45:33 Cybersecurity at AI companies
1:47:33 Will AI turn out well for humanity?
1:50:15 AI and board games

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