80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

Experts believe that artificial intelligence will be better than humans at driving trucks by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing bestselling books by 2049, and working as surgeons by 2053. But how seriously should we take these predictions? Katja Grace, lead author of ‘When Will AI Exceed Human Performance?’, thinks we should treat such guesses as only weak evidence. But she also says there might be much better ways to forecast transformative technology, and that anticipating such advances could be one of our most important projects. Note: Katja's organisation AI Impacts is currently hiring part- and full-time researchers. There’s often pessimism around making accurate predictions in general, and some areas of artificial intelligence might be particularly difficult to forecast. But there are also many things we’re able to predict confidently today -- like the climate of Oxford in five years -- that we no longer give ourselves much credit for. Some aspects of transformative technologies could fall i