Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion

post by fin, wdmacaskill · 2025-03-11T15:38:29.524Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

This is a link post for https://www.forethought.org/research/preparing-for-the-intelligence-explosion

Contents

8 comments

This is a linkpost for a new paper called Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion, by Will MacAskill and Fin Moorhouse. It sets the high-level agenda for the sort of work that Forethought is likely to focus on.

Some of the areas in the paper that we expect to be of most interest to EA Forum or LessWrong readers are:

• Section 3 finds that even without a software feedback loop (i.e. “recursive self-improvement”), even if scaling of compute completely stops in the near term, and even if the rate of algorithmic efficiency improvements slow, then we should still expect very rapid technological development — e.g. a century’s worth of progress in a decade — once AI meaningfully substitutes for human researchers.
• A presentation, in section 4, of the sheer range of challenges that an intelligence explosion would pose, going well beyond the “standard” focuses of AI takeover risk and biorisk.
• Discussion, in section 5, of when we can and can’t use the strategy of just waiting until we have aligned superintelligence and relying on it to solve some problem.
• An overview, in section 6, of what we can do, today, to prepare for this range of challenges. 

Here’s the abstract:

AI that can accelerate research could drive a century of technological progress over just a few years. During such a period, new technological or political developments will raise consequential and hard-to-reverse decisions, in rapid succession. We call these developments grand challenges. 

These challenges include new weapons of mass destruction, AI-enabled autocracies, races to grab offworld resources, and digital beings worthy of moral consideration, as well as opportunities to dramatically improve quality of life and collective decision-making.

We argue that these challenges cannot always be delegated to future AI systems, and suggest things we can do today to meaningfully improve our prospects. AGI preparedness is therefore not just about ensuring that advanced AI systems are aligned: we should be preparing, now, for the disorienting range of developments an intelligence explosion would bring.

8 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.