Survey of 2,700 AI researchers.

The average response placed each of the following within the next 10 years:

Simple Python code given spec and examples
Good high school history essay
Angry Birds (superhuman)
Answer factoid questions with web
World Series of Poker
Read text aloud
Transcribe speech
Answer open-ended fact questions with web
Translate text (vs. fluent amateur)
Group new objects into classes
Fake new song by specific artist
Answers undecided questions well
Top Starcraft play via video of screen
Build payment processing website
Telephone banking services
Translate speech using subtitles
Atari games after 20m play (50% vs. novice)
Finetune LLM
Construct video from new angle
Top 40 Pop Song
Recognize object seen once
All Atari games (vs. pro game tester)
Learn to sort long lists
Fold laundry
Random new computer game (novice level)
NYT best-selling fiction
Translate text in newfound language
Explain AI actions in games
Assemble LEGO given instructions
Win Putnam Math Competition
5km city race as bipedal robot (superhuman)
Beat humans at Go (after same # games)
Find and patch security flaw
Retail Salesperson

...and the following within the next 20 years:

Equations governing virtual worlds
Truck Driver
Replicate ML paper
Install wiring in a house
ML paper

... and the following within the next 40 years:

Publishable math theorems
High Level Machine Intelligence (all human tasks)
Millennium Prize
Surgeon
AI Researcher
Full Automation of Labor (all human jobs)

It should be noted that while these were the averages, the was a very wide variance -- so a wide range of plausible dates.

"Expected feasibility of many AI milestones moved substantially earlier in the course of one year (between 2022 and 2023)."

If you're wondering what the difference between "High-Level Machine Intelligence" and "Full Automation of Labor" is, they said:

"We defined High-Level Machine Intelligence thus: High-level machine intelligence is achieved when unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers. Ignore aspects of tasks for which being a human is intrinsically advantageous, e.g. being accepted as a jury member. Think feasibility, not adoption."

"We defined Full Automation of Labor thus:"

"Say an occupation becomes fully automatable when unaided machines can accomplish it better and more cheaply than human workers. Ignore aspects of occupations for which being a human is intrinsically advantageous, e.g. being accepted as a jury member. Think feasibility, not adoption. [...] Say we have reached 'full automation of labor' when all occupations are fully automatable. That is, when for any occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers."

They go on to say,

"Predictions for a 50% chance of the arrival of Full Automation of Labor are consistently more than sixty years later than those for a 50% chance of the arrival of High Level Machine Intelligence."

That seems crazy to me. In my mind, as soon as feasibility is reachend, cost will go below human labor very quickly, and the technology will be adopted everywhere. That is what has happened with everything computers have automated so far.

"We do not know what accounts for this gap in forecasts. Insofar as High Level Machine Intelligence and Full Automation of Labor refer to the same event, the difference in predictions about the time of their arrival would seem to be a framing effect."

A framing effect that large?

"Since 2016 a majority of respondents have thought that it's either 'quite likely,' 'likely,' or an 'about even chance' that technological progress becomes more than an order of magnitude faster within 5 years of High Level Machine Intelligence being achieved."

"A large majority of participants thought state-of-the-art AI systems in twenty years would be likely or very likely to:"

1. Find unexpected ways to achieve goals (82.3% of respondents),
2. Be able to talk like a human expert on most topics (81.4% of respondents), and
3. Frequently behave in ways that are surprising to humans (69.1% of respondents)

"Most respondents considered it unlikely that users of AI systems in 2028 will be able to know the true reasons for the AI systems' choices, with only 20% giving it better than even odds."

"Scenarios worthy of most concern were: spread of false information e.g. deepfakes (86%), manipulation of large-scale public opinion trends (79%), AI letting dangerous groups make powerful tools (e.g. engineered viruses) (73%), authoritarian rulers using AI to control their populations (73%), and AI systems worsening economic inequality by disproportionately benefiting certain individuals (71%)."

"Respondents exhibited diverse views on the expected goodness/badness of High Level Machine Intelligence. Responses range from extremely optimistic to extremely pessimistic. Over a third of participants (38%) put at least a 10% chance on extremely bad outcomes (e.g. human extinction)."

Thousands of AI authors on the future of AI

#solidstatelife #ai #technologicalunemployment #futurology

Approaching human-Level forecasting with language models.

The idea here is to pit AI head-to-head against humans in forecasting competitions. They mention 5 of these: Metaculus, GJOpen, INFER, Polymarket, and Manifold. The way they are scored is with something called a "Brier score". To keep things simple, they limited their system to only yes/no "binary" questions. When dealing with "binary" questions, the way the Brier score is computed is, one option is assigned the value 0 (say, some event not happening by a certain date), or 1 (the event happening). The person -- or now, language model -- making the prediction actually predicts a probability -- a number between 0 and 1. Once the outcome is known, the difference between the prediction probability number and the actual outcome number is computed and then squared. For multiple predictions, these numbers are all averaged. In this way, the Brier score represents the "error" in the predictions. A perfect predictor will predict "1" for every event that actually happens, and "0" for every event that does not happen, leading to a Brier score of 0. If the predictor does not know if something will happen or not, they can say 0.5, which will lead to a Brier score of 0.25 no matter which outcome actually happens. It's better to do that then to predict 0 or 1 and be wrong.

This glosses over various details like how to handle when people change their predictions, how to handle multiple choice outcomes or numerical outcomes, but you get the idea. The Brier score represents your prediction error.

The researchers found language models are bad at predicting. With no additional information retrieval or fine-tuning, most language models do only a little better than picking at random, and the biggest and best models like GPT-4 and Claude-2 do better than chance but still much worse than humans.

For the dataset that they trained the model on, they used the above-mentioned 5 forecasting competitions and combined data from all of them to get a dataset of 33,664 binary questions. Here's an example showing what these binary questions look like:

"Question: Will Starship achieve liftoff before Monday, May 1st, 2023?"

"Background: On April 14th, SpaceX received a launch license for its Starship spacecraft. A launch scheduled for April 17th was scrubbed due to a frozen valve. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted: 'Learned a lot today, now offloading propellant, retrying in a few days . . . '"

"Resolution: Criteria This question resolves Yes if Starship leaves the launchpad intact and under its own power before 11:59pm ET on Sunday, April 30th."

"Key Dates: Begin Date: 2023-04-17, Close Date: 2023-04-30, Resolve Date: 2023-04-20."

The "begin date" is the date people can start making predictions. The "close date" is the last date people can make predictions. The "resolve date" is the date reality is checked to see if the prediction happened or not. But, for this example, the reason why the "resolve date" is before the "close date" is because the event occurred.

Their system consists of a retrieval system, a reasoning system, and a candidate selection system.

The retrieval system enables the system to do search engine searches. It consists of 4 steps: search query generation, news retrieval, relevance filtering and ranking, and text summarization. The summarization step is because large language models are limited by their context window, and that may be less of a limitation in the future.

The reasoning system works by first prompting the large language model to rephrase the question. The model is next asked to leverage the retrieved information and its pre-training knowledge to produce arguments for why the outcome may or may not occur. Since the model can generate weak arguments, to avoid treating them all as equal, it is instructed to weigh them by importance and aggregate them accordingly. Finally, "to prevent potential bias and miscalibration, the model is asked to check if it is over- or underconfident and consider historical base rates, prompting it to calibrate and amend the prediction accordingly."

This is called reasoning by "scratchpad prompting". Since the aggregate of predictions is usually superior to individual forecasts, this is repeated multiple times and the average is used.

All of this needs to be in place before fine-tuning because it's used by the fine-tuning system. The fine-tuning was done by selecting a subset of the data for fine-tuning, a subset where the model outperformed the human crowd. But they discard examples where the model is too much better than the crowd. They say this is because "We seek to fine-tune our model on strong forecasts" but at the same time, thus using the subset where the model outperformed the human crowd, but, "this can inadvertently cause overconfidence in our fine-tuned model" -- unless they discard the examples where the model exceeds the crowd prediction too much.

"The input to the model consists of the question, description, and resolution criteria, followed by summarized articles. The target output consists of a reasoning and a prediction. Importantly, the fine-tuning input excludes the scratchpad instructions. By doing so, we directly teach the model which reasoning to apply in a given context."

In addition they did a "hyperparameter sweep" where they tried to optimize the hyperparameters. The "hyperparameters" were the search query prompt, the summarization prompt, the number of articles to keep and rank, the reasoning prompt, and the ensembling method for combining multiple answers (they tested 5 different algorithms).

Anyway, the end result of all this is that the large language model had a Brier score of .179, while the crowd had .149, in a difference of only .03. So the system is very close to human accuracy. If traditional "accuracy" numbers are more intuitive to you, they gave 71.5% as their accuracy number, and 77.0% for the human crowd.

Approaching human-Level forecasting with language models

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #llms #futurology #predictionmarkets #brierscore

Stars in our spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy go up and down (relative to the galactic plane) in a giant wave known as the "Radcliffe Wave". Our sun is not a part of it, but it is very close, with the closest point being only 500 light-years away from us. The whole wave is 9,000 light-years long.

The Radcliffe Wave is waving - Ralf Konietzka

#astronomy #futurology

Eurasia Group's top risks for 2024. "Ungoverned AI" is #4. #1 is "The United States vs itself". So we, and our upcoming election, expected to continue the trend of every election being crazier than the previous, is the planet's greatest risk.

On the flip side, they dismiss "US-China crisis" as a "red herring". Whew, I guess we can relax and not worry about that. Also "Populist takeover of European politics" and "BRICS vs G7".

"Risk 1: The United States vs itself: The 2024 election will test American democracy to a degree the nation hasn't experienced in 150 years."

"Risk 2: Middle East on the brink: The region is a tinderbox, and the number of players carrying matches makes the risk of escalation exceptionally high."

"Risk 3: Partitioned Ukraine: Ukraine will be de facto partitioned this year, an unacceptable outcome for Ukraine and the West that will nevertheless become reality."

"Risk 4: Ungoverned AI: Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will move much faster than governance efforts."

"Risk 5: Axis of rogues: Deeper alignment and mutual support between Russia, Iran, and North Korea will pose a growing threat to global stability."

"Risk 6: No China recovery: Any green shoots in the Chinese economy will only raise false hopes of a recovery as economic constraints and political dynamics prevent a durable growth rebound."

"Risk 7: The fight for critical minerals: The scramble for critical minerals will heat up as importers and exporters intensify their use of industrial policies and trade restrictions."

"Risk 8: No room for error: The global inflation shock that began in 2021 will continue to exert a powerful economic and political drag in 2024."

"Risk 9: El Nino is back: A powerful El Nino climate pattern will bring extreme weather events that cause food insecurity, increase water stress, disrupt logistics, spread disease, and fuel migration and political instability."

"Risk 10: Risky business: Companies caught in the crossfire of US culture wars will see their decision-making autonomy limited and their cost of doing business rise."

"Red herrings: US-China crisis. Populist takeover of European politics. BRICS vs G7."

"Addendums: These addendums for Brazil, Canada, Europe, and Japan further illustrate how global risks play out in different parts of the world, with specific implications for governments and businesses."

Eurasia Group | The Top Risks of 2024

#futurology #risk #geopolitics

Companies that provide survivalist bunkers for billionaires include: Atlas Survival Shelters (Texas), Vivos (California), SAFE (Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments) + Vital RN (Virginia), Creative Home Engineering (Arizona), and Ultimate Bunker (Utah).

Oh, and because this is The Hollywood Reporter, there's a whole bunch of stuff about fiery moats! water cannons! and rotating fireplaces right out of 'Indiana Jones'!

Billionaires' survivalist bunkers go absolutely bonkers with fiery moats and water cannons

#futurology #dystopia

"Rapid AI progress surprises even experts: Survey just out"

Sabine Hossenfelder reviews a survey of 2,778 AI researchers. They say 50% chance of "high level machine intelligence" ("comparable to human intelligence") by 2047, but that's down 13 years from the same survey a year ago, which said 2060.

For "full automation of labor", 50% probability by 2120 or so, but that's down almost 50 years from last years' prediction. (So last years' prediction must've been 2170 or so).

I can't help but think, does anybody seriously think it will take that long? I get that the "AGI in 7 months" predictions are a bit hard to take seriously, but still? Do these people not understand exponential curves?

Ray Kurzweil, and before him, Al Bartlett, are famous for saying people extrapolate the current rate of change linearly out into the future, so always underestimate exponential curves. Not implying Kurzweil or Bartlett are right about everything but this does look to me like what is happening, and you would think professional AI researchers, of all people, would know better.

Rapid AI progress surprises even experts: Survey just out - Sabine Hossenfelder

#solidstatelife #futurology #ai #exponentialgrowth #technologicalunemployment

"Charted: The rapid decline of global birth rates."

1950-2021 for the world's 50 most populous countries. Eh, 49 most populous. It's a 7x7 grid.

There's an interactive table further down the page where you can sort by birth rate for 1950, 1990, or 2021, or the change between 1950 and 2021.

Charted: The rapid decline of global birth rates

#futurology #demographics #fertility

Qcells to supply Microsoft with 12 GW of solar panels in expanded partnership

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Microsoft is committed to going carbon-negative by 2030 and aims to achieve 100% electricity consumption coverage with renewable energy by 2025.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hanwha-qcells-microsoft-expand-solar-panel-supply-partnership-cartersville-georgia/703949/
#futurology, #hydrogen, #green, #news

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"Megaprojects of the future."

A space elevator. A moon base. Space solar farms. An underwater city.

For the space elevator one, he fails to mention the problem of space junk. If you put a satellite up in space, it orbits at a particular altitude and only has to worry about space junk at that altitude. But a space elevator has to worry about space junk at every altitude from the ground to geosynchronous orbit. Because of this, dodging space junk is a critical requirement of any space elevator that gets built.

So it's not just a matter of having a strong enough material. It's also a matter of making intelligent space-junk-dodging systems.

Megaprojects of the future - Sideprojects

#solidstatelife #futurology #astronomy

"Year in Search 2023".

From Google. For "TV Shows", I didn't recognize any of them in the top 5. Expand to the top 10, and... I still don't recognize any of them.

What can we conclude from this? I'm out of it.

For "People", only 1 of the top 5, 2 of top 10. For actors, I didn't recognize any out of the top 5. 1 out of the top 10. For video games, I recognized 1 out of the top 5, 2 out of the top 10. For "Athletes", none of top 10. Even for "Musicians", only 1 of the top 5, 2 out of the top 10.

It's so funny, I work so hard to try to figure out what's going on, yet I'm totally out of it.

Year in Search 2023

#futurology #popculture

Deep in the Wilderness, the Largest Beaver Dam Endures

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https://e360.yale.edu/features/worlds-largest-beaver-dam
#renewableenergy, #renewable, #futurology

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According to this video, Iran is now a Muslim-minority country, despite being "The Islamic Republic of Iran" since 1979 and enforcing Islamic law, including the death penalty for apostasy. Not only that, but the exodus from Islam happening right now in Iran is the fastest exodus from any religion ever in the history of humanity. I know religion is a touchy subject but if this is true it seems very "futurology-relevant".

The secret atheists of the Arab world - Atheist Republic

#futurology #demographics #religion

"Over the past few decades, evidence has built that the Maya of Central America extensively used a mercury-containing compound for decoration and art. Mercury was so prevalent that archaeological sites are still heavily contaminated today. Tellingly, scientists reported that two water reservoirs in the heart of the ancient city of Tikal contained toxic levels of mercury, raising the possibility that the Maya suffered adverse health effects."

The "mercury-containing compound" they are referring to is cinnabar, which is mercury sulfide.

The Maya coveted mercury. It may have hastened their downfall.

#futurology #archaeology #chemistry #maya

AI predictions from Angela Collier. The link should take you to 45:03 in the video where she makes her predictions. If not, skip to 45:03. Or, if you want, you can rewind it and hear the whole rant. Basically she says AI isn't what it's cracked up to be -- basically true artificial intelligence doesn't exist but people are going to wind up in all kinds of trouble from deploying "AI" that doesn't really work.

Lawyers will use ChatGPT to write legal briefs -- oh, that already happened. Therapy robots will be introduced so you can fire all your therapists -- oh, that already happened. A professor will give students all "F"s for using ChatGPT when they actually didn't -- oh, that already happened. On to some stuff that hasn't happened yet. A big company is going to fire everybody and replace them with AI and fail and have to be bailed out by the government. People will die from AI medical advice and somebody will get sued. Some medical office will get sued for replacing people with AI and someone who needs medical care will be denied. A school district will get sued for firing their guidance counselor and replacing them with AI. Every single consumer product will have "AI". AI will prevent someone from getting a bank account, and she'll call her senator, and nobody will be able to do anything until a Netflix documentary is made. A company will invent an AI tool to talk to AI tools until it is able to reach an actual person for you.

AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway - acollierastro

#solidstatelife #ai #futurology

DOE releases strategy to reach 30 GW offshore wind by 2030, aiming to cut costs 30%, to $51/MWh

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The agency says that a full commitment to reaching offshore wind goals would generate $12 billion in yearly investments.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/department-energy-strategy-offshore-wind-plan/646381/
#renewableenergy, #hydrogen, #renewable, #photovoltaic, #futurology

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Ready for your employer to monitor your brainwaves? If you listen to music while you work, you could get work-issued earbuds so your employer can monitor your brainwaves while you work. That way, one day when you come in to work, you'll find the office in a somber mood because employee brainwave data has been subpoenaed for a lawsuit -- because one employee committed wire fraud and investigators are looking for co-conspirators by looking for people with synchronized brainwave activity. You don't know anything about the fraud but you were working with the accused employee in secret on a start-up venture. Uh-oh.

According to Nita Farahany, in this talk at the World Economic Forum, all the technology to do this exists already, now. She goes on to tout the benefits of employer brain monitoring: reduction in accidents through detection of micro-sleep, fatigue, or lapse of attention due to distraction or cognitive overload. Furthermore it can optimize brain usage through "cognitive ergonomics".

She goes on to say it can be used as a tool of oppression as well, and calls for international human rights laws guaranteeing "cognitive liberty" be put in place before the technology becomes widespread.

When she talked about "freedom of thought", I literally laughed out loud. Nobody I know believes in that. Everyone I know believes the thoughts of other people need to be controlled. (Maybe not literally everyone. It's a figure of speech.)

By way of commentary, do I think "brain transparency" at work will happen? Probably. I remember in the 1980s, there was this comedian, Yakov Smirnoff, who would tell jokes like, "In America, you watch TV. In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!" Well, it's not really a joke any more, is it? He's describing YouTube. When you watch YouTube, YouTube watches you. Everything you watch, down to the fraction of a second. They use that information for giving you recommendations and ... and other stuff. Wouldn't you like to know what the other stuff is? They know, but none of the rest of us get to know. Everyone is guessing but nobody knows. And that's just YouTube. Every aspect of life now is like this. We are always watched, but we usually don't know what the watchers are watching for.

So of course once the technology comes on line to give people access to other people's brainwaves, it's going to get used. What would be shocking would be if employer's didn't try to use this to squeeze every last ounce of productivity from employees. Look at what is happening now with tracking of every footstep of warehouse workers.

Ready for brain transparency?

#futurology #solidstatelife #technologicalunemployment #neurotechnology #eeg

"Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past."

"This is the world's third-largest economy. It's a peaceful, prosperous country with the longest life expectancy in the world, the lowest murder rate, little political conflict, a powerful passport, and the sublime Shinkansen, the world's best high-speed rail network."

"America and Europe once feared the Japanese economic juggernaut much the same way they fear China's growing economic might today. But the Japan the world expected never arrived."

But why?

"If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start."

"Japan is estimated to have had fewer than 800,000 births last year. In the 1970s, that figure was more than two million."

Population peaked at 128 million in 2017, is 125 million now, is projected to be 53 million by the end of the century.

"Japan now has the world's second-highest proportion of people aged 65 and over -- about 28% -- after the tiny state of Monaco."

#futurology #demographics

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63830490

Researchers create smaller, cheaper flow batteries for clean energy

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Flow batteries offer a solution. Electrolytes flow through electrochemical cells from storage tanks in this rechargeable battery. The existing flow battery technologies cost more than $200/kilowatt hour and are too expensive for practical application, but engineers have now developed a more compact flow battery cell configuration that reduces the size of the cell by 75%, and correspondingly reduces the size and cost of the entire flow battery. The work could revolutionize how everything from major commercial buildings to residential homes are powered.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230113145335.htm
#solarpower, #futurology, #photovoltaic, #renewableenergy, #RSS

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Researchers create smaller, cheaper flow batteries for clean energy

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Flow batteries offer a solution. Electrolytes flow through electrochemical cells from storage tanks in this rechargeable battery. The existing flow battery technologies cost more than $200/kilowatt hour and are too expensive for practical application, but engineers have now developed a more compact flow battery cell configuration that reduces the size of the cell by 75%, and correspondingly reduces the size and cost of the entire flow battery. The work could revolutionize how everything from major commercial buildings to residential homes are powered.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230113145335.htm
#futurology, #photovoltaic, #renewable, #sustainability, #news

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Is Gen Z 'quiet quitting'? Hypothesis presented is businesses have long expected people to go "above and beyond", in other words to do more work than they are paid for, and with each generation the motivation to comply has decreased. Presents data that support for unions has gone up.

Why Gen Z is 'quiet quitting' - Stay Tuned

#futurology #demography #generations #psychology #economics #laborunions