Welcome to the AI near-future

A malevolent superintelligence will not be taking over the planet any time soon. But how the AI revolution plays out will depend on a series of races between the technology and human institutions. AI will remove humans from many combat roles, but it will also mean that any human in combat will be killed with extreme efficiency.

- CHARLES FERGUSON

We are now two years into a transformation comparable in importance to the first Industrial Revolution. But with expert forecasts of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) ranging from Panglossian to apocalyptic, can we really say anything yet about what it portends? I think we can.

First, neither nirvana nor human extinction will come anytime soon. Instead, we can look forward to many years of instability. AI technology will continue to make rapid progress, with ever more remarkable capabilities. We haven't even exhausted the current transformer-based models (which rely heavily on brute force computation), and enormous efforts are under way to develop better models, semiconductor technologies, processor architectures, algorithms, and training methods. Eventually, we will get to artificial general intelligence systems that equal or surpass human intellect.

For now, though, AI remains remarkably limited. It cannot even cook a meal or walk your dog, much less fight a war or manage an organization. A malevolent superintelligence will not be taking over the planet any time soon. But how the AI revolution plays out—and the ratio of progress to pain—will depend on a series of races between the technology and human institutions. So far, the technology is leaving the human institutions in the dust.

I am very much an optimist about AI's potential benefits, and I see exciting and encouraging developments in education, art, medicine, robotics, and other fields. But I also see risks, most of which are not being addressed. What follows is a brief, necessarily simplistic, tour.

It's Complicated