π Faster, Please! Week in Review #51
AI answers; AI and economic growth; the (maybe) coming of superintelligence; and much more!
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
β 5 fascinating questions β and answers β about AI
β Will AI cause 'explosive' economic growth?Best of 5QQ
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ policy writer Aaron Renn on what we can learn from Indianapolis
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ physician and policy analyst Brian J. Miller on the future of AI and medicine
Essay Highlights
π€ 5 fascinating questions β and answers β about AI
A happy American Independence Day to all! I decided to use this holiday week as an opportunity to create a mini-symposium from some of my many recent interviews on the recent advances in artificial intelligence. Hereβs one of the five Q&A responses I featured:
All of the remarkable progress in all of human history, and especially over the past few centuries, has been a direct consequence of productively harnessing human intelligence. Even though the past few centuries have also been marked by incredible tragedies and catastrophes, our increased prosperity has generally made us kinder to each other. AI has the potential to go way beyond the constraints of biological intelligence, and in a matter of years help us accomplish what otherwise would have taken centuries. The prospects of overcoming our current most intractable problems β political, social, economic, medical, technological β are the biggest arguments in favor of pushing for AI development.β
π₯ Will AI cause 'explosive' economic growth?
The flipside of artificial intelligence causing existential human risk is AI generating explosive economic growth. Thereβs been far less analysis of the latter β which, I think, says something unfortunate about societal attitudes about technology and risk. The possibility of AI generating warp-speed economic growth was the subject of a fascinating recent conversation, published at the wonderful Asterisk magazine, between Open Philanthropy economist Matt Clancy and Tamay Besiroglu, a research scientist at MITβs Computer Science and AI Laboratory. By βexplosive growth,β Besiroglu and Clancy are describing him a rate of growth, in Besirogluβs words, βthat far surpasses anything weβve previously witnessed β a minimum of tenfold the annual growth rate observed over the past century, sustained for at least a decade.β Bottom line from this back and forth: To grow explosively, we need either faster automation or total automation. If AI keeps taking over tasks slowly, we will have steady growth, not explosive growth.
π¦ After AGI: Is artificial 'super' intelligence coming soon?
Although the terms βartificial general intelligenceβ and βsuperintelligenceβ (or βartificial super intelligenceβ or βsuper machine intelligenceβ) are sometimes used interchangeably β understandably because they all refer to highly intelligent AI β that conflation should be avoided. The folks at ChatGPT creator OpenAI define AGI as βAI systems that are generally smarter than humansβ and superintelligence as AI systems βdramatically more capable than even AGI.β And in a new blog post, the company says this: βWhile superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade.β AGI arriving that soon is certainly a more aggressive timeline than what Iβve been expecting even at my most optimistic. Given the potential artificial superintelligence timeline suggested by OpenAI, it might be a race between achieving superintelligence and the goal of βsteering or controllingβ a superintelligence. AGI and ASI could help humanity do some pretty cool stuff, such as cure disease, create a better environment, reduce poverty, and explore the universe.
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ policy writer Aaron Renn on what we can learn from Indianapolis
Aaron Renn is a writer and consultant in Indianapolis who is a co-founder and Senior Fellow at American Reformer. He recently wrote a fantastic, thought-provoking chapter on Indianapolis in The Future of Cities.
You have argued that red states should "reorient their philosophy of governance away from a business-centric strategy toward a citizen-centric one." What do you mean by that?
Red state governments frequently enact policies that they argue will attract business, whether that be tax cuts, right to work, incentive programs, regulatory rollbacks, or other. We often hear about Texas or other such places pursuing those policies that have boomed. But again, there is a strong geographic overlay. These success stories are almost exclusively in the Sunbelt. When a red state like Indiana pulled all of these levers, it basically didnβt work. It does better on some measures and worse on others, but Indiana is broadly in the middle of the pack of my 23-state Old North area and is certainly not seeing a Texas, Florida, or Tennessee type boom.
While the business climate is important, I argue that red states should spend more time thinking about the well-being and preferences of the people who live there. Too often, they choose to side with exploitative businesses like slumlords, casinos, etc. instead of their own citizens. Their leaders also frequently embrace leftist policies like DEI in the name of attracting business. It hasnβt worked, and it only angered a citizenry whose cultural aspirations have been neglected or even suppressed.
Brian J. Miller is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a practicing hospitalist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and an assistant professor of medicine and business at Johns Hopkins University.
Labor productivity in the health care sector has been stagnant for many years. Will AI boost those productivity numbers?
Absolutely it can. AI will initially serve two functions. First, so-called "automation of the mundane" or completion of administrative tasks. The second is to augment current clinical efforts, organizing the patient chart and providing salient near-time information, or suggesting potential diagnoses or treatment plans. In the long term, some components of clinical practice will become automated allowing trained-clinicians to practice up to the level of their license.