Stuart Russell

But I think, you know, as happened with nuclear weapons, it can happen overnight that you have these breakthroughs.

And we need more than one breakthrough, but, you know, it's on the order of half a dozen.

I mean, this is a very rough scale, but sort of half a dozen breakthroughs of that nature happen.

would have to happen for us to reach superhuman AI.

But the AI research community is vast now.

The massive investments from governments, from corporations, tons of really, really smart people.

You just have to look at the rate of progress in different areas of AI to see that things are moving pretty fast.

So to say, oh, it's just going to be thousands of years, I don't see any basis for that.

I see...

For example, the Stanford 100-Year AI Project, which is supposed to be sort of the serious establishment view, their most recent report actually said it's probably not even possible.

Right, which if you want a perfect example of people in denial, that's it.

Because, you know, for the whole history of AI, we've been saying to philosophers who said it wasn't possible, well, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Of course, it's possible, right?

Give me an argument for why it couldn't happen.

and there isn't one, right?

And now, because people are worried that maybe AI might get a bad name, or I just don't want to think about this, they're saying, okay, well, of course, it's not really possible, you know?

I mean, imagine, right?

Imagine if, you know, the leaders of the cancer biology community got up and said, well, you know, of course, curing cancer, it's not really possible.

It would be a complete outrage and dismay, and

I find this really a strange phenomenon.