The Intelligence Age

September 23, 2024

A vibrant, impressionistic landscape of a winding path that stretches towards the horizon, lined with colorful fields

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.

It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.

With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of miserable rich people – but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.

Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?

In three words: deep learning worked.

In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.

That’s really it; humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). To a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential it is.

There are a lot of details we still have to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world.

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.

Technology brought us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy, and human will.

If we want to put AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to drive down the cost of compute and make it abundant (which requires lots of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars get fought over and that becomes mostly a tool for rich people.

We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.

I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.

As we have seen with other technologies, there will also be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimizing its harms. As one example, we expect that this technology can cause a significant change in labor markets (good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). People have an innate desire to create and to be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we will be back in an expanding world, and we can again focus on playing positive-sum games.

Many of the jobs we do today would have looked like trifling wastes of time to people a few hundred years ago, but nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast-forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity all around us would feel just as unimaginable.

Last edited by @suen 2024-09-23T21:51:13Z

The Intelligence Age

在接下來的幾十年裡,我們將能夠做到一些在我們祖父母的眼裡看起來像魔法一樣的事情。
這種現象並不新鮮,但它會被加速。人們隨著時間的推移變得顯著更有能力;我們現在已經能夠完成我們的前輩認為不可能的事情。
我們的能力增強並不是因為基因的變化,而是因為我們受益於比我們任何一個人都要聰明且更有能力的社會基礎設施;在某種重要的意義上,社會本身就是一種高級的智能。
我們的祖父母——以及在他們之前的幾代人——建設並實現了偉大的成就。他們為我們所有人受益的人類進步提供了基礎。
人工智能將為人們提供解決難題的工具,並幫助我們添加一些我們自己無法解決的問題的新支撐點。
進步的故事將繼續下去,而我們的孩子將能夠做到我們無法做到的事情。

這不會一次性發生,但我們很快將能夠與人工智能合作,幫助我們實現比沒有人工智能時多得多的事情;最終,我們每個人都能擁有一個個人的人工智能團隊,這個團隊由不同領域的虛擬專家組成,共同創造幾乎任何我們能夠想像的東西。
我們的孩子將擁有虛擬導師,這些導師可以在任何科目、任何語言中根據他們的需求提供個性化的教學。我們可以想像出類似的想法,例如更好的醫療保健、創造任何人能夠想像的軟件的能力等等。

有了這些新的能力,我們可以實現共享的繁榮,達到今天看似難以想像的程度;在未來,每個人的生活都可以比現在任何人的生活更美好。
繁榮本身不一定會讓人們幸福——有很多富有但痛苦的人——但它確實會大大改善世界各地人們的生活。

這是對人類歷史的一種狹窄的看法:經過數千年的科學發現和技術進步的積累,我們已經找到了如何將沙子熔化,添加一些雜質,以驚人的精確度排列到極其微小的尺度,形成電腦芯片,讓能量流過它,最終創造出能夠不斷增強能力的人工智能系統。

這可能會成為整個歷史中最重要的事實。
我們可能在幾千天內擁有超級智能(!);它可能會花更長的時間,但我相信我們最終會達到。

我們是如何走到繁榮的下一個飛躍門檻的?
用三個字來說:深度學習起作用了。
用十五個字來說:深度學習起作用了,隨著規模擴大,它可預見地變得更好,我們投入了更多的資源。

這真的就是全部;人類發現了一種算法,這種算法能夠真正學習任何數據分佈(或者更準確地說,生成任何數據分佈的潛在“規則”)。
令人驚訝的是,計算資源和數據越多,它就越能幫助人們解決困難的問題。
無論我花多少時間思考這件事,我總是無法真正內化它的深遠影響。

我們還有許多細節需要弄清楚,但分散注意力於某個特定挑戰是一個錯誤。深度學習有效,我們將解決剩下的問題。我們可以對接下來可能發生的事情說很多話,但主要的一點是,隨著規模的擴大,人工智能將變得更好,這將為全球人民的生活帶來顯著改善。

人工智能模型將很快作為自主的個人助理,代表我們執行具體任務,例如協調醫療服務。在未來的某個時刻,人工智能系統將變得如此強大,以至於它們幫助我們創造更好的下一代系統,並在各個領域取得科學進展。

技術將我們從石器時代帶到了農業時代,然後來到了工業時代。從這裡開始,通往智能時代的道路由計算資源、能量和人類意志鋪就。
如果我們想要將人工智能置於儘可能多的人手中,我們需要降低計算資源的成本,並使其變得充裕(這需要大量的能源和芯片)。如果我們不建立足夠的基礎設施,人工智能將成為一種非常有限的資源,甚至成為戰爭的焦點,並主要成為富人的工具。

我們需要明智但堅定地行動。智能時代的曙光是一個意義重大、充滿極其複雜且具有高風險挑戰的時刻。這將不是一個完全正面的故事,但其巨大的好處如此之多,我們有義務為了我們自己和未來,找出如何應對眼前的風險。

我相信未來將如此光明,以至於沒有人能通過現在的寫作來真正描述它;智能時代的一個標誌性特徵將是大規模的繁榮。
雖然這將逐步實現,但驚人的勝利——修復氣候問題,建立太空殖民地,發現所有的物理定律——最終將變得司空見慣。
有了近乎無限的智慧和充足的能源——創造偉大想法的能力,並使它們成為現實的能力——我們可以做到很多事情。

如同我們在其他技術上所見,這也將有一些負面影響,我們需要現在就開始努力,最大限度地發揮人工智能的好處,同時將其危害降到最低。舉個例子,我們預計這項技術在未來幾年會對勞動力市場產生重大影響(既有好處也有壞處),但大多數工作將比大多數人想像的變化更慢,我也不擔心我們會無事可做(即使它們看起來不像今天的“真實工作”)。
人們有天生的創造欲望和互相幫助的願望,而人工智能將使我們能夠比以往任何時候都更大程度地放大我們的能力。作為一個社會,我們將回到一個不斷擴展的世界,我們可以再次專注於玩正和博弈。

我們今天所做的許多工作,在幾百年前的人看來可能會顯得像是在浪費時間,但沒有人會回頭看過去,期望自己成為一個點燈人。如果一個點燈人能看到今天的世界,他會認為他周圍的繁榮是難以想像的。如果我們能快進到今天的百年後,周圍的繁榮同樣會讓我們感到無法想像。