Nathaniel Whittemore

The point is, we live in the world that we live in.

And in the same moment where the Commerce Secretary of the United States told this same Davos forum in no uncertain terms that globalization had failed, this is not the moment where there is either the political capital or the political will for some enforceable cross-border pause.

Which is not to say that there isn't a good conversation to be had about what society can do to not just sleepwalk into one of the most profound disruptions it's ever experienced.

The one singular thing that connects the full spectrum of AI folks from the accelerationists to the safetyists is their belief that the change that AI is bringing is immense.

That singular common thread creates the opportunity to build unexpected coalitions to help support public awareness, discussions of policy response, and basically broadly help us adapt to the changes that are coming, but not if we spend all our time on soundbite policies.

And indeed, this was another part of the discussion with Amede and Hassabis.

Dario reiterated his concern that we're going to see, in his words, a very unusual combination of very fast GDP growth and high unemployment, and said there's going to need to be some role for governments in a displacement that's this macroeconomically large.

Hassabis is more optimistic about our ability to adapt, but also believes that it will take an intentional adaptation.

One of my greatest personal frustrations is time wasted on dumb conversations when we desperately need good ones.

and I hope that the net effect of comments like these coming out of the World Economic Forum is a positive shift in the discourse.

I am, however, not holding my breath.

Now, one specific prediction to follow up on.

It was actually at Davos last year that Dario started talking about how much of software engineering was going to be overtaken by AI on a very short one-year type of timeline.

People were extremely skeptical, and although one could quibble about the exactness of Dario's timelines, recent history has certainly proved him to be more directionally correct than directionally wrong.

In his latest update to that prediction, he is arguing that software engineering will be automatable in 12 months, predicting that AI models will be able to do, in his words, most, maybe all of what software engineers do end-to-end within 6 to 12 months.

This is, by the way, part of why his timelines are faster than Demis's.

building on our theme from a few days ago of code AGI as a stepping stone to full AGI, it's very clear that Dario believes that the point at which AI can do end-to-end what software engineers do now is where the recursive feedback loop where AI builds better AI begins.

And while there will continue to be debates about this, this is an increasingly common point of view.

Node.js creator Ryan Doll recently went viral on Twitter when he posted, This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice.

The era of humans writing code is over.