Kyle Corbitt

When people ask why—despite all the risks—I'm optimistic about our AI-dominated future, I sometimes struggle to paint a legible picture of what the good version of that future actually looks like to me.

@adi_baradwaj An AI could become superhumanly persuasive though subtly controlling someone's whole media environment and tailoring its content/arguments to them. It would have tools no cult leader or politician has had.

There's a recurring pattern that I keep seeing in work coming from the apocalyptic branch of the AI safety community, and it goes something like this: 1) Pick some intellectual "talent" that might be attributed to a person (e.g. persuasiveness, discernment, charisma, etc.) 2) Model this "talent" as a scalar quantity that is primarily determined by factors endogenous to the individual, as opposed to environmental/situational factors 3) Assume that this scalar quantity can be made arbitrarily large 4) Use this model to make predictions about the future of AI You can see this here with AI 2040's insinuation that "superhuman persuasiveness" is an idea we should be taking seriously It's not obvious to me at all that "persuasiveness" is a human talent, as opposed to a sociological random process that we retroactively perceive as a human "talent" To be clear, certainly it's true that a star debater might be marginally more "persuasive" than someone who's not! But I don't think a cult leader or a popular politician is 1,000x or 1,000,000x more "persuasive" than an ordinary person Rather, they're perceived being "persuasive" because they happen to be the figureheads for a complex sociological preference cascade. Their "persuasiveness" isn't really a thing you can causally influence at the individual level, and definitely not in an unbounded way In general, I think a lot of the AI 2040-style forecasting work does a poor job of dealing with this kind of irreducible complexity inherent to the universe. They usually just like to pretend it doesn't exist Not a huge fan of this pattern

@sebkrier I really appreciate concrete visions like this. I tried to answer a similar question through a short story set in a near-future post-AGI world, exploring what a good life looks like under those constraints. Would love to get your take on it! x.com/corbtt/status/…

Positive visions of the future are easy to produce, so it's understandable that people dismiss them. I think that's a mistake, and that disempowerment-fatalism is just as easy. If I had to imagine a nice 'post-AGI' vision, it would look like this: I have to work much less, but still have a chunk of the year working if I want to. There is no 'work day' but there are 'work hours'. Opting out is sustainable for those who don't want it. A Venetian-like economy creates new roles, tasks, and quests that people never imagined could exist (I think full substitution will take much longer to bite than people assume). The rest of the year is a mix of travelling, helping design a new city somewhere, doing research/writing that is more longitudinal in nature, and making music with new synths designed at some workshop in a different continent (the world of atoms is flourishing, and globalization is so back). Low goods/services prices let me and my friends coordinate a few impromptu hangouts abroad every now and then - we realize it's much easier to nurture social life when time is not a blocker, and coordination costs are lowered by agents. My family's health issues are managed, giving them more years to live (clinical trials have sped up significantly). The decreased dependence on living in a large capital city combined with the affordability of building transport infrastructure leads to a flourishing of new towns in places that would otherwise languish; people are excited to build them (yes building is legal again). There are a number of large scale projects to create colonies in space for the more ambitious pioneers, and many highly paid jobs there too. Coordination tech lets people self-select into hubs, communities, towns that fit their vibes. In fact, the 'age of polarization' is now behind and a lot of governance is pushed down to the local level, which lowers the stakes of national identity fights. Conflicts naturally remain, but the 'boring majority' is no longer faced with having to choose between two flavours of outrage and righteousness. Government is human-led and agent-mediated. Automated dispute resolution lets human courts deal with more important and significant cases. Citizens can automatically simulate the likely impacts of proposed laws, and agents help demystify them. The machinery of government still has humans, but it's far leaner; there's a neat separation between instrumental tasks (automated) and normative ones (augmented). Politicians are rewarded more, but they're also under automated scrutiny by constituents - e.g. commitments are easier to monitor and enforce. I could go on! But as I write this, some will rightly say 'well this just sounds like a nice sci-fi story', and tbh they wouldn't be entirely wrong. For each sentence I can find a story why it might not happen. It's still helpful to outline a positive vision of the future to have an idea of what to aim for, but ultimately much of this will come down to resourceful political entrepreneurs, founders of new companies, important changes in legislation and culture and so on. You don'tt get any of this automatically, it's an endogenous dynamic that depends on how many people exercise their agency. There is of course a degree of determinism to technology, and wider dynamics that cannot be stopped - but people too often point to them as if disempowerment is the only possible outcome. I think that's 'spectator cope', and a lot of shaping will remain possible. Societal change is inherently hard and diffuse, but it's certainly not impossible - too many people despair at being unable to control wide structural changes, but that's missing the trees for the forest, in the most literal sense.

@jrhwood Totally agree. I wrote up a more positive (but realistic) vision that I would love to get your take on! x.com/corbtt/status/…

Much of EA scripture relies on dystopian sci-fi tropes, we need to paint a positive vision for ai.

@JoshPhillipsPhD This really is the central social question of our age! I wrote up a short story trying to address it. tl;dr is that I'm optimistic about humanity's future, even if the things we are "for" will have to change. x.com/corbtt/status/…

Let’s assume AI is WAY BETTER at teaching all the subjects Still no one is asking, “What are Humans for?” Are we supposed to be really smart beings living inside all day in front of a screen? Interacting with no one? Can we at least admit something valuable will be lost?

@egervet @Handre I don't think work is essential, but being needed by something/somebody probably is (I really like "Deep Utopia"'s exploration of this idea). I wrote a short story exploring this! x.com/corbtt/status/…

Makes you think @handre … What is your take on the future if we have more abundance than ever (energy + AI & robotics)? Is work an essential part of purpose?

@garrytan I wrote up a short story about that world recently that you might enjoy! x.com/corbtt/status/…

So much could go wrong But the interesting question is always: what happens if things go right?

@LoopOnChain Yeah I think some kind of "Citizens' Dividend" style payout will be a necessary component of any good timeline.

@corbtt Do you think we end up with universal basic income? The thought was that AI was going to take everybody's jobs, but the data certainly does not support that.

When people ask why—despite all the risks—I'm optimistic about our AI-dominated future, I sometimes struggle to paint a legible picture of what the good version of that future actually looks like to me.

I hope you enjoy the story! It's a short read, and I put a lot of love into it. corbt.com/posts/the-mach…

But telling the positive stories—narrating the worlds in which we avoid those outcomes—is an important part of that fight. Humans live on stories, and the right stories can make the good outcomes more likely by building the shared vision of the world we want to move towards.

@alexgraveley Most people are going to have a lot more free time, and many fewer opportunities to do economically useful work.

@simonw FB marketplace is just an illustrative example. At this point I've used Codex to automate some tedious task across the majority of the online services I regularly use.

@simonw I'd put money on this being resolved in the other direction (the browser you use and the browser your AI agents use will tend to converge). It's too useful for my agent to be able to eg. manage a Facebook Marketplace listing for me. It needs my accounts.

With Atlas being retired in favor of the browser embedded in the ChatGPT app I wonder if the whole category of AI-enhanced browsers is coming to a close The security/privacy issues remain unsolvable IMO - I want my AI to use its own separate browser and stay out of the one I use

@alexgraveley community clout, plus you feel good about yourself. same reason people volunteer for the PTA, or to lead a boy scout troop.

@corbtt What's the non-commercial incentive?

A happy AI future prediction: life gets a lot more *human centered*. - AI efficiency flattens competition - flat competition leads to many more small businesses - small business success is built on personal relationships - relationships increase in value - we take more of an interest in people around us I think this makes sense, but let me know what you think.

@deredleritt3r @_NathanCalvin The more interesting thing to me is what it reveals about their internal accounting. Sounds like research gets a lump of compute, and they can decide how much is used on running the actual experiments and how much is used running coding agents (to design/babysit experiments).