The Age of Intelligence

In the coming decades, we will be able to do things that were magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be accelerated again. Humans have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already achieve things that our predecessors thought impossible.

We are more capable, not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from an infrastructure of society that is far smarter and more capable than any of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents—and the generations that came before them—built and accomplished great things. They helped build the scaffolding of human progress that benefits us all. AI will give humans tools to solve hard problems and help us add new supports to that scaffolding that we could not have imagined on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things that we cannot.

It won’t all happen at once, but we will soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish far more than we ever could without it; eventually, we could each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different fields, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at any pace they need. We can think of similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software anyone can imagine, and much more.

With these new skills, we could have shared prosperity on a scale that seems unthinkable today; in the future, everyone’s life could be better than everyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone would not necessarily make people happy – there are plenty of poor rich people – but it would significantly improve the lives of people all over the world.

This is a limited way of looking at human history: after thousands of years of successive scientific discoveries and technological advances, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities to it, arrange it with astonishing precision on extremely small scales into computer chips, pass energy through it, and ultimately have systems capable of creating ever more powerful artificial intelligence.

This may turn out to be the most consistent fact in history so far. It is possible that in a few thousand days (!) we will have superintelligence; it may take longer, but I am confident that we will get there.

How did we get to the threshold of the next leap in prosperity?

In three words: deep learning worked.

In 15 words: deep learning worked, and it got predictably better as it grew larger and we devoted more and more resources to it.

It really is; humanity discovered an algorithm that could learn virtually any distribution of data (or rather, the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data). With shocking precision: the more computing power and data available, the better it helps people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend on this, I never quite internalize how important it is.

There are still many details to figure out, but it’s a mistake to get distracted by a specific challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. There’s a lot we can say about what might happen next, but the bottom line is that AI will get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements in the lives of people all over the world.

AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants that perform specific tasks on our behalf, such as coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point in the future, AI systems will become so good that they will help us create better next-generation systems and make scientific progress on all fronts.

Technology took us from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age and then to the Industrial Age. From here, the path to the Intelligence Age is paved with compute, energy and human will.

If we want to get AI into the hands of as many people as possible, we need to lower the cost of computing and make it abundant (which requires a lot of energy and chips). If we don’t build enough infrastructure, AI will be a very limited resource that wars will be fought over and will become a tool for the rich.

We must act wisely, but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a major development with very complex and extremely high stakes. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so enormous that we owe it to ourselves and to the future to figure out how to navigate the risks ahead.

I believe that the future will be so bright that no one can write about it now. A defining feature of the Intelligence Age will be enormous prosperity.

Although it will happen incrementally, astonishing triumphs—improving the climate, establishing a space colony, discovering all of physics—will eventually become commonplace. With almost limitless intelligence and abundant energy—the ability to generate great ideas and make them a reality—we can do a great deal.

As we’ve seen with other technologies, there will be downsides, and we need to start working now to maximize the benefits of AI and minimize the downsides. As an example, we expect this technology to significantly change the job market (both good and bad) in the coming years, but most jobs will change more slowly than most people think, and I’m not afraid that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us today). Humans have an innate desire to create and be useful to each other, and AI will allow us to amplify our own abilities like never before. As a society, we’ll return to an expanding world, and we can get back to playing positive-sum games.

Many of the jobs we do today would have seemed like an insignificant waste of time to people a few hundred years ago, but no one looks back and wishes they were a lamplighter. If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity around him was unimaginable. And if we could fast forward a hundred years from today, the prosperity around us would feel just as unimaginable.