# Will AGI surprise the world?

Cross-posted from [my blog](http://lukemuehlhauser.com/will-agi-surprise-the-world/).

Yudkowsky [writes](/lw/hp5/after_critical_event_w_happens_they_still_wont/):

> In general and across all instances I can think of so far, I do not agree with the part of your futurological forecast in which you reason, "After event W happens, everyone will see the truth of proposition X, leading them to endorse Y and agree with me about policy decision Z."
> 
> ...
> 
> Example 2: "As AI gets more sophisticated, everyone will realize that real AI is on the way and then they'll start taking Friendly AI development seriously."
> 
> Alternative projection: As AI gets more sophisticated, the rest of society can't see any difference between the latest breakthrough reported in a press release and that business earlier with Watson beating Ken Jennings or Deep Blue beating Kasparov; it seems like the same sort of press release to them. The same people who were talking about robot overlords earlier continue to talk about robot overlords. The same people who were talking about human irreproducibility continue to talk about human specialness. Concern is expressed over technological unemployment the same as today or Keynes in 1930, and this is used to fuel someone's previous ideological commitment to a basic income guarantee, inequality reduction, or whatever. The same tiny segment of unusually consequentialist people are concerned about Friendly AI as before. If anyone in the science community does start thinking that superintelligent AI is on the way, they exhibit the same distribution of performance as modern scientists who think it's on the way, e.g. Hugo de Garis, Ben Goertzel, etc.

My own projection goes more like this:

> As AI gets more sophisticated, and as more prestigious AI scientists begin to publicly acknowledge that AI is plausibly only 2-6 decades away, policy-makers and research funders will begin to respond to the AGI safety challenge, just like they began to respond to CFC damages in the late 70s, to global warming in the late 80s, and to synbio developments in the 2010s. As for society at large, I dunno. They'll think all kinds of random stuff for random reasons, and in some cases this will seriously impede effective policy, as it does in the USA for science education and immigration reform. Because AGI lends itself to arms races and is harder to handle adequately than global warming or nuclear security are, policy-makers and industry leaders will generally know AGI is coming but be unable to fund the needed efforts and coordinate effectively enough to ensure good outcomes.

At least one clear difference between my projection and Yudkowsky's is that I expect AI-expert performance on the problem to improve substantially as a greater fraction of _elite_ AI scientists begin to think about the issue in [Near mode rather than Far mode](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html).

As a friend of mine suggested recently, current elite awareness of the AGI safety challenge is roughly where elite awareness of the global warming challenge was in the early 80s. Except, I expect elite acknowledgement of the AGI safety challenge to spread more slowly than it did for global warming or nuclear security, because AGI is tougher to forecast in general, and involves trickier philosophical nuances. (Nobody was ever tempted to say, "But as the nuclear chain reaction grows in power, it will necessarily become more moral!")

Still, there is a worryingly non-negligible chance that AGI explodes "out of nowhere." Sometimes important theorems are proved suddenly after decades of failed attempts by other mathematicians, and sometimes a computational procedure is [sped up by 20 orders of magnitude with a single breakthrough](http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mwalfish/papers/pepper-ndss12.pdf).