Preparing for the Impending Arrival of Artificial General Intelligence
I believe that over the past several years, A.I. systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains, including math, coding, and medical diagnosis, and that they’re getting better every day. I believe that very soon, one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.
The Insiders are Alarmed
The most disorienting thing about today’s A.I. industry is that the people closest to the technology – the employees and executives of the leading A.I. labs – tend to be the most worried about how fast it’s improving. This is quite unusual. Back in 2010, when I was covering the rise of social media, nobody inside Twitter, Foursquare, or Pinterest was warning that their apps could cause societal chaos. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t testing Facebook to find evidence that it could be used to create novel bioweapons or carry out autonomous cyberattacks.
The A.I. Models Keep Getting Better
To me, just as persuasive as expert opinion is the evidence that today’s A.I. systems are improving quickly, in ways that are fairly obvious to anyone who uses them. In 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, the leading A.I. models struggled with basic arithmetic, frequently failed at complex reasoning problems, and often "hallucinated," or made up nonexistent facts. Chatbots from that era could do impressive things with the right prompting, but you’d never use one for anything critically important.
Overpreparing is Better than Underpreparing
In the spirit of epistemic humility, I should say that I, and many others, could be wrong about our timelines. Maybe A.I. progress will hit a bottleneck we weren’t expecting – an energy shortage that prevents A.I. companies from building bigger data centers, or limited access to the powerful chips used to train A.I. models. Maybe today’s model architectures and training techniques can’t take us all the way to A.G.I., and more breakthroughs are needed.
Conclusion
I believe that the right time to start preparing for A.G.I. is now. Even if A.G.I. arrives a decade later than I expect, I believe we should start preparing for it now. Most of the advice I’ve heard for how institutions should prepare for A.G.I. boils down to things we should be doing anyway: modernizing our energy infrastructure, hardening our cybersecurity defenses, speeding up the approval pipeline for A.I.-designed drugs, writing regulations to prevent the most serious A.I. harms, teaching A.I. literacy in schools, and prioritizing social and emotional development over soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.)?
A: A.G.I. is a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.
Q: How soon will A.G.I. arrive?
A: I believe it will arrive in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year.
Q: What are the implications of A.G.I.?
A: A.G.I. will generate trillions of dollars in economic value and tilt the balance of political and military power toward the nations that control it.
Q: Are you worried about overpreparing for A.G.I.?
A: No, I believe it’s better to be prepared for A.G.I. than to be caught off guard by its arrival.
Q: What should we do to prepare for A.G.I.?
A: We should modernize our energy infrastructure, harden our cybersecurity defenses, speed up the approval pipeline for A.I.-designed drugs, write regulations to prevent the most serious A.I. harms, teach A.I. literacy in schools, and prioritize social and emotional development over soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills.
