Giving Compass' Take:

• Paul Christiano, writing for Medium, examines how artificial intelligence will impact job growth, wages, and human values. 

• How do donors think AI will change philanthropy? What will be the future challenges? 

• Read more about artificial intelligence and the future of humans. 

I think that the development of human-level artificial intelligence in my lifetime is quite plausible; I would give it more than a 1-in-4 chance. In this post, I want to briefly discuss what I see as the most important impacts of AI. I think these impacts are the heavy hitters by a solid margin; each of them seems like a big deal, and I think there is a big gap between #4.

  • Growth will accelerate, probably very significantly.
  • Human wages will fall, probably very far.
  • Human values won’t be the only thing shaping the future.

My guess is that the first two impacts are relatively likely, that there is unlikely to be a strong enough regulatory response to prevent them, and that their net effects on human welfare will be significant and positive. The third impact is more speculative, probably negative, more likely to be prevented by coordination (whether political regulation, coordination by researchers, or something else), and also I think more important on a long-run humanitarian perspective.

I think that avoiding fast growth would involve solving an unprecedented coordination problem, and would involve large welfare losses for living people. I think this is very unlikely (compare to environmental issues today, which seem to have a lower bar for coordination, smaller welfare costs to avert, and clearer harms).

Read the full article about artificial intelligence by Paul Christiano at Medium.