Dwarkesh Patel Explains How AI Could Radically Improve Civilization

If we do get AGI, it would just be so hard to contain it. If you didn't release ChatGPT, you wouldn't have been able to know that this is a feature people really wanted. Just imagine this scaled up like 100x, 1,000x integrated into all our senses, maybe even into our minds. I became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future.

I think the real bottleneck is just we got to make them smarter. Mhm. I don't think they're already so cheap. It's like 2 cents per million tokens or something ridiculous. I think the real bottleneck for me using them more is not their price, but them being more useful, being able to take over more parts of the economy.

There has been this trend in AI where whenever there's a big breakthrough we think we've automated a large part of what intelligence is and in fact in retrospect it's clear that it was only a beginning. So the big example here is when Deep Blue came out and beat Kasparov at chess. People thought that this was a big breakthrough in intelligence in general because we thought that what chess required was general intelligence and you might have heard this concept of AI-complete problems where if you solve this problem then you've solved intelligence. So people said that about self-driving. The Turing test was supposed to be AI-complete. We've gone through all of these subcomponents of intelligence and afterwards we realized there's actually still more left to it. The thing that's sort of underrated is not even agency per se, although that's a part of it. I think the thing that's underrated is we humans have this global hive mind where the reason we can make iPhones and buildings and whatever is not just intelligence and also not just agency. It's the fact that there's so much specialization. There's so much capital deepening. People are just doing things, trying different ideas. AIs need to be smarter in order to do that. They need to have more agency in order to do that. But once they can, if you have millions of AIs running around trying different things, that's when we get the real acceleration. You'll feel it in your blood.

So to me, I get very excited about it because it's like having any human be able to create beautiful images out of text is fantastic. I became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future. You're getting a glimpse just from these early images of how cool and beautiful the things AI makes or helps us make will be. Just imagine this scaled up like 100x, a thousandx integrated into all our senses, maybe even into our minds, integrated into the way we relate with the people we care about and so forth. The future could be really beautiful.