Rob Wiblin

Maybe they have a few pet technologies that they're most interested in.

And maybe we have this one or that one.

Slightly better medicine.

People live slightly longer.

And yeah, it's an amount of change that's extremely manageable.

I think on the far extreme from there, on the other side, is like a view described in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, where in that worldview,

At some point, probably pretty unpredictably, we sort of crack the code to extreme superintelligence.

We invent a technology that rather suddenly goes from being like GPT-5 and GPT-6 and so on to being so much smarter than us that we're like cats or like mice or ants compared to this thing's intelligence.

And then that thing can like really immediately have like really extreme impacts on the physical world.

The classical sort of canonical example here being inventing nanotechnology.

So like the ability to like precisely manufacture things that are like really, really tiny and can replicate themselves really, really quickly and can do like all sorts of things, you know, and can like move, you know, inventing like space probes close to the speed of light and things like that.

I think there's a whole spectrum in between where people think that we are going to get to a world where we have technologies approaching their physical limits, we have spaceships approaching the speed of light, and we have self-replicating entities that replicate as quickly as bacteria while also doing useful things for us.

But we're going to have to go through intermediate stages before getting there.

But I think like something that unites all of the people who are sort of AI futurists and like concerned about AI X risk is that they think in the coming decades, we're likely to get this level of like extreme technological progress driven by AI.

I think it's a very strong correlation.

I've found often that reasonable people who are AI accelerationists tend to think that the default course of how AI is developed and deployed in the world is very, very, very slow and gradual.

And they think that we should cut some red tape to make it go at a little bit more of a reasonable pace.

And people who

are worried about X-risk think that the default course of AI is this extremely explosive thing where it like, you know, overturns society on all dimensions at once in, you know, maybe a year or maybe five years or maybe six months or maybe a week.

And they're saying, oh, we should slow it down to take 10 years maybe.