Ajeya Cotra

How strong is the correlation between how much someone expects AI or AGI to speed up science research in particular, and I guess like physical industry as well, and how likely they think it is to go poorly or how nervous they are about the whole prospect?

It's quite interesting.

I guess people who radically differ in their policy prescriptions might be targeting, aiming for the same level of speed, actually.

Maybe they wanted this period to take 10 years or 20 years.

That's what both of them want.

But they just think their baseline is so different, so they're pushing in completely opposite directions.

What's your kind of modal expectation?

What do you think is the most likely impact for it to have?

So you're saying you're expecting in the 2030s, it won't just be that these AI models are capable of automating computer-based R&D, but they'll also be able to lead on the project of building fabricators that produce the chips that they run on.

And so that's like another kind of positive feedback loop.

So I guess the range of expectations that exist among sensible, thoughtful people who've engaged with this on how much, like at peak, how much is AGI going to speed up economic growth?

It ranges from people who say it will speed up economic growth by 0.3 percentage points.

So it'll be a 15% increase or something on current rates of economic growth.

And I'd be very happy if it was that good.

People would say at peak,

the economy will be growing at a thousand percent a year or higher than that, thousands of percent a year.

So it's like a hundred or a thousand or a 10,000 fold disagreement basically on the likely impact that this is going to have.

It's an almost like unfathomable degree of disagreement among people who, it's not as if they've thought about this independently and they haven't had a chance to talk.

They've spoken about this, they've shared their reasons and they don't change their mind and they disagree by a thousand fold impact.

I guess, and you've made it part of your, I guess, mission in life the last couple of years to have like really sincere conversations