A researcher at the model evaluation group METR says the world could experience changes by mid-century that rival the span from the hunter-gatherer era to today.
In a recent interview on the 80,000 Hours podcast, technical staff member Ajeya Cotra challenges the common assumption that even with artificial general intelligence (AGI), the next few decades will merely resemble the last few.
“Whether or not we get AGI in the next few years, a lot of people are starting to not really care about that question. They still expect the next 25 years and the next 50 years to play out kind of like the last 25 years of the last 50 years, where there’s a lot of technological change between 2000 and 2025, but it’s like a moderate amount of change.
They kind of expect that in 2050 there will be a similar amount of change as there was between 2000 and 2025, even if they think that we’re going to get AGI in 2030. They think AGI is just like what’s going to drive that sort of continued mild improvement.”
But Cotra outlines a different possibility, one where AI enables humans to achieve unthinkable technological feats in a relatively short amount of time.
“Whereas I think that there’s a pretty good chance that by 2050, the world will look as different from today as today does from like the hunter-gatherer era. You know, like it’s like 10,000 years of progress rather than 25 years of progress driven by AI automating all intellectual activity.
In that worldview, you have at some point, probably pretty unpredictably, we crack the code to extreme superintelligence.”
She cites nanotechnology as an example of what such intelligence might unlock.
“So the ability to precisely manufacture things that are like really, really tiny and can replicate themselves really, really quickly and can do like all sorts of things, and can move, inventing like space probes close to the speed of light and things like that.”
Cotra’s remarks frame AI not as a continuation of the current technological trajectory, but as a potential inflection point that could compress millennia of progress into a single generation.
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