I think it would be useful to get a feel for Forum users' AI timelines. There are three questions, two of which are designed to align with questions on a LessWrong survey (from 2023). They are roughly year of artificial general intelligence, singularity (variously defined as cannot predict beyond, super exponential or explosive growth of the economy, etc.), and "crazy." Feel free to define "crazy" as you wish, but some possibilities could be greater than 20% unemployment in most countries, widespread political unrest, widespread loss of confidence in what is true, widespread economic growth exceeding 10% per year[1], your personal plans being disrupted by something related to AI, etc. It would be interesting to see in the comments how people define this. Please use the median year of your distribution (an even chance of happening before or after).
There are 21 locations on each poll, and they correspond to these years (if you comment, it would be helpful for you to put the year in, as the automatic description is not very helpful):
- 2026
- 2027
- 2028
- 2029
- 2030
- 2032
- 2035
- 2037
- 2040
- 2045
- 2050 (the middle of the poll range)
- 2060
- 2070
- 2080
- 2100
- 2125
- 2150
- 2200
- 2300
- later
- never
By what year do you think AI will be able to do intellectual tasks that expert humans currently do?
By what year do you think the singularity will occur?
By what year do you think the world will get crazy?
- ^
Not recovering from a recession.
This is a cool post, though I think it's kind of annoying not to be able to see the specific numbers that one is putting them on without reading the chart.
Yeah perhaps this is a feature for polls v3 (v2 is almost done).
To clarify, does our "crazy" vote consider all possible causes of crazy, or just crazy that is caused by / significantly associated with AI?
Good question. For personal planning purposes, I think all causes would make sense. But the title is AI, so maybe just significantly associated with AI? I think these polls are about how the future is different because of AI.
25 years seems about right to me, but with huge uncertainty.
Though I think we could get explosive economic growth with AGI or even before, I'm going to interpret this as explosive physical growth, that we could double physical resources every year or less. I think that will take years after AGI to, e.g., crack robotics/molecular manufacturing.
First i have zero expertise here and am rubbish at prediction
I don't think LLMs will get there, but something else probably will after that but maybe not in the very near future. I have a strong (perhaps too strong) feeling that the complexities of the human brain in forward planning/ task stacking and truly creative thought might be further away than we think.
i also think there's likely to be a warning shot and then the kind of political backlash that could even slow things down 10 years or so.
Slow things down 10 to how many years?
sorry edited
I'm using a combination of scenarios in the post - one or more of these happen significantly before AGI.
Help me make sure I’m understanding this right. You’re at position #4 from left to right, so this means 2029 according to your list. So, this means you think there’s a 50% chance of a combination of the "crazy" scenarios happening by 2029, right?
Unfortunately, the EA Forum polls software makes it hard to ask certain kinds of questions. Your prediction is listed as "70% 2026", but that’s just an artifact of the poll software.
To make it clear to readers what people are actually predicting, and to make sure people giving predictions understand the system properly, you might want to add instructions for people to say something like '50% chance the Year of Crazy happens by 2029’ at the top of their comments. That would at least save readers the trouble of cross-referencing the list for every single prediction.
I tried to do a poll on people’s AI bubble predictions and I ran into a similar issue with the poll software displaying the results confusingly.
Yes, one or more of the "crazy" things happening by 2029. Good suggestion: I have edited the post and my comments to include the year.
Extrapolating the METR graph here <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6KcP7tEe5hgvHbrSF/metr-how-does-time-horizon-vary-across-domains> means soon for super-human coder, but I think it's going to take years after that for the tasks that are slower on that graph, and many tasks are not even on that graph (despite the speedup from having a superhuman coder).