So where's this AI thing going?

The Overton window is shifting with statements like An Alien Mind from OpenAI's chief scientist and Jacob Coxon's viral statement on x-risk on resigning from Anthropic. I think we should try to push it further. This is my public-facing explanation of AI progress and x-risk, where we're at and where we're probably heading. Most LessWrong readers are up on pretty much all of this and have their own opinions; I'm offering it here in case anyone is interested in my communication strategy, giving me feedback, or sending friends this brief intro to AI x-risk and timelines, and FAQ because you like my approach here. My approach is bitter medicine with just a little sugar. I want to engage people more than I want to avoid scaring them, but I want to protect their feelings enough that they can handle thinking about this enough to believe it and engage. I follow the path of saying what I actually think, because softpedaling and being vague make you sound like a liar. But I do try to prepare the reader for the shock and explain why this all sounds so weird and hard to believe. This is my take, but it's intended to be a fairly accurate representation of how much of the AI safety community sees the situation. I'm interested in feedback. If you think these statements aren't a fair compression of the complex truth, I want to know. If you see rough edges or missed opportunities, let me know. I'd like to polish this presentation, and I'd like your help doing that. What's going to happen with AI? What's happening with AI, you might've wondered? We don't know where AI is going, even those of us who spend most of our time trying to figure that out. What we do know is that it's going somewhere, fast. AIs (ChatGPT and similar systems) are getting smarter and more capable. AI isn't really that big a deal now, but before long it will be. You might've heard people confidently declaring how AI will turn out. I've studied the topic about as much as anyone now, and more than most of the people you've heard claiming to know. I'm pretty sure the simple fact is that none of us know where it's going yet. The future is unknown, and undecided. Whether AI is good or bad for humanity depends on how carefully we build it. So far, we're not really being careful at all, but there's time to change that. The future will be different, just like it's always been If AI is going to be such a big deal, why haven't you already heard about all of this? The short answer is that it's hard to believe something this scary and this weird; the mind finds excuses to not think about it seriously. And some people who believe it haven't been talking about it in public, because it would make them sound like lunatics, and maybe cost them their jobs. This is starting to change; see this excellent Time article, in which many people building the most advanced AI say things similar to what I'm saying here. I say more about this in the FAQ section below; check it out first if this question will keep you from taking what I have to tell you seriously. And it's hard to take seriously, because here's what I have to tell you: before long, AI will be more like first contact with aliens than another new technology. It's like we've heard that aliens will be landing in a few years. We'll encounter an alien species more advanced than we are, and it could bring great things if they want to help us, or be the end of us if they want to take over our planet. But we're building and training these aliens ourselves. This sounds like wild science fiction. But the future has always been science fiction to the past. Imagine telling someone from 1900 what a cell phone is and what it can do. They'd think you were nuts or a liar, even if you could tell them exactly why and how we'd eventually build devices that could send moving pictures over miles of thin air. While the truth of what's happening right now is scary, it's also exciting. If we can take this seriously, we could get ourselves a much better future. AI-generated cures for cancer are just the beginning of the positive potentials. We could get much more material wealth without grinding labor, and better ways to share that wealth fairly. This concept is called post-scarcity by futurists, and it's time to start aiming for it. Research on AI is speeding up rapidly as more money is invested, more people are hired, more computing power is purchased and rented, and AI itself is rapidly becoming better at helping to create new, smarter and more competent AI. We should strongly expect progress to speed up, not slow down. Research could hit a wall, but it probably won't. If it doesn't hit a wall, we'll pretty soon have AI that can do many jobs. Soon after that, it may be able to do any job, including gaining power and running the world. We don't know how long we have before AI is smarter and more competent than humans. So we should take action right now. NO FATE While we can't predict outcomes from building superhuman AI, we can say th