Imagine you’re living 15,000 years ago. Your people are hunter-gatherers and you sleep under the stars. If someone told you humans would one day build cities with millions of people, fly through the air, or carry all human knowledge in their pockets, you couldn’t even begin to picture what they meant... Yet here we are.
How did our lives change so far beyond recognition? The story is complex, but there’s a rough pattern. A few times in history, some radical breakthrough in technology — like the development of the plough and the steam engine — has led to a wave of productivity, innovation, and social change that ultimately reshaped the world.
Now we’re on the cusp of a huge new breakthrough: artificial intelligence that can meet or exceed human capabilities across a wide range of tasks.
This could bring another era of transformation. There could be an explosion of intelligence and innovation, and a whole new population of digital beings. And with this, civilisation could see changes at least as profound as those brought about by industrialisation or the rise of agriculture — but instead of taking hundreds or thousands of years to unfold, this time around the world could become unrecognisable over the span of decades or less.
This transformation could bring enormous benefits, helping us solve currently intractable global problems. But it could also pose severe risks, some of which could be existential — meaning they could cause human extinction, or an equally permanent and severe disempowerment of humanity.
There aren’t nearly enough people trying to address these challenges, and we think that’s a serious problem.
This article is narrated by the author, Zershaaneh Qureshi. It explores how advanced AI could be so transformative, and why working on its risks may be your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.
You can see the original article on the 80,000 Hours website: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/
Chapters:
- Introduction (00:00:00)
- Section 1: AI could replace human labour in the most economically valuable fields (00:08:32)
- Section 2: Replacing human labour in the most economically valuable fields could trigger the next radical transformation of society (00:22:14)
- Section 3: This transformation could be extremely rapid and dramatic (00:28:02)
- Section 4: A rapid AI-driven transformation would raise a range of major challenges, including existential risks (00:36:40)
- Section 5: Work on these problems is tractable, but neglected (00:44:48)
- Objection 1: “You're overestimating how fast and how dramatically AI would transform the world.” (00:47:59)
- Objection 2: “It's hard to believe that AI could really pose existential risks.” (00:52:59)
- Objection 3: “Isn't all this talk of AI changing the world just a fad?” (00:59:22)
- Objection 4: “Isn't AI going to be just like every other technology?” (01:03:04)
- Objection 5: “Is it even possible to produce artificial general intelligence?” (01:06:16)
- Objection 6: “Even if AGI is achievable, what if we're really far away from building it?” (01:11:24)
- Objection 7: “Isn't the real danger from actual current AI and not some sort of futuristic AGI?” (01:14:05)
- Objection 8: “Technological progress is a good thing for humanity.” (01:18:10)
- Objection 9: “This all just sounds too sci-fi.” (01:19:50)
- Objection 10: “Can it really make sense to dedicate my career to solving an issue that's based on a speculative story about something that may or may not ever happen?” (01:22:15)
- Objection 11: “OK, AI might pose existential risks, but isn't ‘issue X’ an even bigger problem?” (01:24:39)
- Learn more (01:27:51)
Audio editing: Dominic Armstrong
Production: Zershaaneh Qureshi, Elizabeth Cox, Katy Moore, and Lou Moran
