Chapter 06 · Section I · 10 min read
About predicting the future
Why most "AI will do X by 2030" predictions are wrong — and how to read the ones that are right.
Predictions about AI tend to come in two flavours: catastrophist (“we are all out of work in two years”) and dismissive (“it’s just a chatbot, calm down”). Both are usually wrong, because both ignore the same boring truth: AI moves fast in narrow places and slowly in broad ones.
The systems that translate text are now wildly better than they were in 2020. The systems that drive cars are roughly where they were in 2018. Predicting which side a given task falls on is hard — but the questions to ask are: how much data exists?, how easy is it to define success?, and does failure cost lives or just money?
This section is a stub. The full version will give a framework for reading AI predictions skeptically.