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This is: Against GDP as a metric for timelines and takeoff speeds, published by Daniel Kokotajlo on the AI Alignment Forum.
[Epistemic status: Strong opinion, lightly held]
I think world GDP (and economic growth more generally) is overrated as a metric for AI timelines and takeoff speeds.
Here are some uses of GDP that I disagree with, or at least think should be accompanied by cautionary notes:
Timelines: Ajeya Cotra thinks of transformative AI as “software which causes a tenfold acceleration in the rate of growth of the world economy (assuming that it is used everywhere that it would be economically profitable to use it).” I don’t mean to single her out in particular; this seems like the standard definition now. And I think it's much better than one prominent alternative, which is to date your AI timelines to the first time world GDP (GWP) doubles in a year!
Takeoff Speeds: Paul Christiano argues for Slow Takeoff. He thinks we can use GDP growth rates as a proxy for takeoff speeds. In particular, he thinks Slow Takeoff ~= GWP doubles in 4 years before the start of the first 1-year GWP doubling. This proxy/definition has received a lot of uptake.
Timelines: David Roodman’s excellent model projects GWP hitting infinity in median 2047, which I calculate means TAI in median 2037. To be clear, he would probably agree that we shouldn’t use these projections to forecast TAI, but I wish to add additional reasons for caution.
Timelines: I’ve sometimes heard things like this: “GWP growth is stagnating over the past century or so; hyperbolic progress has ended; therefore TAI is very unlikely.”
Takeoff Speeds: Various people have said things like this to me: “If you think there’s a 50% chance of TAI by 2032, then surely you must think there’s close to a 50% chance of GWP growing by 8% per year by 2025, since TAI is going to make growth rates go much higher than that, and progress is typically continuous.”
Both: Relatedly, I sometimes hear that TAI can’t be less than 5 years away, because we would have seen massive economic applications of AI by now—AI should be growing GWP at least a little already, if it is to grow it by a lot in a few years.
First, I’ll argue that GWP is only tenuously and noisily connected to what we care about when forecasting AI timelines. Specifically, the point of no return is what we care about, and there’s a good chance it’ll come years before GWP starts to increase. It could also come years after, or anything in between.
Then, I’ll argue that GWP is a poor proxy for what we care about when thinking about AI takeoff speeds as well. This follows from the previous argument about how the point of no return may come before GWP starts to accelerate. Even if we bracket that point, however, there are plausible scenarios in which a slow takeoff has fast GWP acceleration and in which a fast takeoff has slow GWP acceleration.
Timelines
I’ve previously argued that for AI timelines, what we care about is the “point of no return,” the day we lose most of our ability to reduce AI risk. This could be the day advanced unaligned AI builds swarms of nanobots, but probably it’ll be much earlier, e.g. the day it is deployed, or the day it finishes training, or even years before then when things go off the rails due to less advanced AI systems. (Of course, it probably won’t literally be a day; probably it will be an extended period where we gradually lose influence over the future.)
Now, I’ll argue that in particular, an AI-induced potential point of no return (PONR for short) is reasonably likely to come before world GDP starts to grow noticeably faster than usual.
Disclaimer: These arguments aren’t conclusive; we shouldn’t be confident that the PONR will precede GWP acceleration. It’s entirely possible that the PONR will indeed come when GWP starts to grow noticeably faster than...
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