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đ¤ AI risks and rewards: My chat (+transcript) with AI researcher Miles Brundage
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
Artificial intelligence may prove to be one of the most transformative technologies in history, but like any tool, its immense power for good comes with a unique array of risks, both large and small.
Today on Faster, Please! â The Podcast, I chat with Miles Brundage about extracting the most out of AIâs potential while mitigating harms. We discuss the evolving expectations for AI development and how to reconcile with the technologyâs most daunting challenges.
Brundage is an AI policy researcher. He is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Progress, and formerly held a number of senior roles at OpenAI. He is also the author of his own Substack.
In This Episode
* Setting expectations (1:18)
* Maximizing the benefits (7:21)
* Recognizing the risks (13:23)
* Pacing true progress (19:04)
* Considering national security (21:39)
* Grounds for optimism and pessimism (27:15)
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Setting expectations (1:18)
It seems to me like there are multiple vibe shifts happening at different cadences and in different directions.
Pethokoukis: Earlier this year I was moderating a discussion between an economist here at AEI and a CEO of a leading AI company, and when I asked each of them how AI might impact our lives, our economists said, âWell, I could imagine, for instance, a doctorâs productivity increasing because AI could accurately and deeply translate and transcribe an appointment with a patient in a way thatâs far better than whatâs currently available.â So that was his scenario. And then I asked the same question of the AI company CEO, who said, by contrast, âWell, I think within a decade, all human death will be optional thanks to AI-driven medical advances.â On that rather broad spectrum â more efficient doctor appointments and immortality â how do you see the potential of this technology?
Brundage: Itâs a good question. I donât think those are necessarily mutually exclusive. I think, in general, AI can both augment productivity and substitute for human labor, and the ratio of those things is kind of hard to predict and might be very policy dependent and social-norm dependent. What I will say is that, in general, it seems to me like the pace of progress is very fast and so both augmentation and substitutions seem to be picking up steam.
Itâs kind of interesting watching the debate between AI researchers and economists, and I have a colleague who has said that the AI researchers sometimes underestimate the practical challenges in deployment at scale. Conversely, the economists sometimes underestimate just how quickly the technology is advancing. I think thereâs maybe some happy middle to be found, or perhaps one of the more extreme perspectives is true. But personally, I am not an economist, I canât really speak to all of the details of substitution, and augmentation, and all the policy variables here, but what I will say is that at least the technical potential for very significant amounts of augmentation of human labor, as well as substitution for human labor, seem pretty likely on even well less than 10 years â but certainly within 10 years things will change a lot.
It seems to me that the vibe has shifted a bit. When I talk to people from the Bay Area and I give them the Washington or Wall Street economist view, to them I sound unbelievably gloomy and cautious. But it seems the vibe has shifted, at least recently, to where a lot of people think that major advanc
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