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I got interested in EA back before it was called EA, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. Now I’m trying to figure out where EA can fit into my life these days and what it means to me.
Here’s the link to the original post: https://epochai.substack.com/p/the-case-for-multi-decade-ai-timelines
One important point in the post — illustrated with the example of the dot com boom and bust — is that it’s madness to just look at a trend and extrapolate it indefinitely. You need an explanatory theory of why the trend is happening and why it might continue or why it might stop. In the absence of an explanatory understanding of what is happening, you are just making a wild, blind guess about the future.
(David Deutsch makes this point in his awesome book The Beginning of Infinity and in one of his TED Talks.)
A pointed question which Ege Erdil does not ask in the post, but should: is there any hard evidence of AI systems invented within the last 5 years or even the last 10 years doing any labour automation or any measurable productivity augmentation of human workers?
I have looked and I have found very little evidence of this.
One study I found had mixed results. It looked at the use of LLMs to aid people working in customer support, which seems to me like it should be one of the easiest kinds of jobs to automate using LLMs. The study found that the LLMs increased productivity for new, inexperienced employees but decreased productivity for experienced employees who already knew the ins and outs of the job:
If the amount of labour automation or productivity improvement from LLMs is zero or negative, then naively extrapolating this trend forward would mean full labour automation by AI is an infinite amount of time away. But of course I’ve just argued why these kinds of extrapolations are a mistake.
It continually strikes me as odd that people write 3,000-word, 5,000-word, and 10,000-word essays on AGI and don’t ask fundamental questions like this. You’d think if the trend you are discussing is labour automation by AI, you’d want to see if AI is automating any labour in a way we can rigorously measure. Why are people ignoring that obvious question?
Nvidia revenue is a really bad proxy for AI-based labour automation or for the productivity impact of AI. It’s a bad proxy for the same reason capital investment into AI would be a bad proxy. It measures resources going into AI (inputs), not resources generated by AI (outputs).