Share:


Existential risk from transformative AI: an economic perspective

    Jakub Growiec Affiliation

Abstract

The prospective arrival of transformative artificial intelligence (TAI) will be a filter for the human civilization – a threshold beyond which it will either strongly accelerate its growth, or vanish. Historical evidence on technological progress in AI capabilities and economic incentives to pursue it suggest that TAI will most likely be developed in just one to four decades. In contrast, theoretical problems of AI alignment, needed to be solved in order for TAI to be “friendly” towards humans rather than cause our extinction, appear difficult and impossible to solve by mechanically increasing the amount of compute. This means that transformative AI poses an imminent existential risk to the humankind which ought to be urgently addressed. Starting from this premise, this paper provides new economic perspectives on discussions surrounding the issue: whether addressing existential risks is cost effective and fair towards the contemporary poor, whether it constitutes “Pascal’s mugging”, how to quantify risks that have never materialized in the past, how discounting affects our assessment of existential risk, and how to include the prospects of upcoming singularity in economic forecasts. The paper also suggests possible policy actions, such as ramping up public funding on research on existential risks and AI safety, and improving regulation of the AI sector, preferably within a global policy framework.


First published online 10 July 2024

Keyword : transformative artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, alignment, existential risk, long-run economic growth, longtermism

How to Cite
Growiec, J. (2024). Existential risk from transformative AI: an economic perspective. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.3846/tede.2024.21525
Published in Issue
Jul 10, 2024
Abstract Views
603
PDF Downloads
401
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

References

Acemoglu, D., & Autor, D. (2011). Skills, tasks and technologies: Implications for employment and earnings. In O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (Eds.), Handbook of labor economics (vol. 4, pp. 1043–1171). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7218(11)02410-5

Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2018). The race between man and machine: Implications of technology for growth, factor shares and employment. American Economic Review, 108(6), 1488–1542. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20160696

Albanesi, S., Dias da Silva, A., Jimeno, J. F., Lamo, A., & Wabitsch, A. (2023). New technologies and jobs in Europe. (Working Paper No. 31357). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31357

Aschenbrenner, L. (2020). Existential risk and growth (Working Paper No. 6). Columbia University and Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Leopold-Aschenbrenner_Existential-risk-and-growth_.pdf

Autor, D., Dorn, D., Katz, L., Patterson, C., & Van Reenen, J. (2020). The fall of the labor share and the rise of superstar firms. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2), 645–709. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa004

Barro, R. J. (2003). Determinants of economic growth in a panel of countries. Annals of Economics and Finance, 4, 231–274. https://down.aefweb.net/WorkingPapers/w505.pdf

Bloom, N., Jones, C. I., Van Reenen, J. & Webb, M. (2020). Are ideas getting harder to find? American Economic Review, 110(4), 1104–1144. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180338

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press.

Bostrom, N., Douglas, T., & Sandberg, A. (2016). The unilateralist’s curse and the case for a principle of conformity. Social Epistemology, 30(4), 350–371. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2015.1108373

Branwen, G. (2022, January 2). The scaling hypothesis. https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis

Bubeck, S., Chandrasekaran, V., Eldan, R., Gehrke, J., Horvitz, E., Kamar, E., Lee, P., Lee, Y. T., Li, Y., Lundberg, S. M., Nori, H., Palangi, H., Ribeiro, M. T. & Zhang, Y. (2023). Sparks of artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4. ArXiv:2303.12712. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.12712

Chichilnisky, G. (2000). An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics, 22(3), 221–231. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0928-7655(00)00032-4

Chichilnisky, G., Hammond, P. J., & Stern, N. (2020). Fundamental utilitarianism and intergenerational equity with extinction discounting. Social Choice and Welfare, 54, 397–427. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-019-01236-z

Cotra, A. (2020). Draft report on AI timelines. AI Alignment Forum. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines

Cotra, A. (2022). Two-year update on my personal AI timelines. AI Alignment Forum. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines

Davidson, T. (2021). Could advanced AI drive explosive economic growth? Open Philanthropy. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/could-advanced-ai-drive-explosive-economic-growth/

Davidson, T. (2023) What a compute-centric framework says about takeoff speeds. Open Philanthropy. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/what-a-compute-centric-framework-says-about-takeoff-speeds/

Eloundou, T., Manning, S., Mishkin, P., & Rock, D. (2023). GPTs are GPTs: an early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models (Working Paper No. 2303.10130). Arxiv.org. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.10130

Etzioni, O. (2016). No, the experts don’t think superintelligent AI is a threat to humanity. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/09/20/70131/no-the-experts-dont-think-superintelligent-ai-is-a-threat-to-humanity/

Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114, 254–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.019

Gordon, R. J. (2016). The rise and fall of American growth: The U.S. standard of living since the Civil War. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873302

Grace, K. (2022). Let’s think about slowing down AI. Less Wrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uFNgRumrDTpBfQGrs/let-s-think-about-slowing-down-ai

Grace, K., Stewart, H., Sandkühler, J. F., Thomas, S., Weinstein-Raun, B., & Brauner, J. (2024). Thousands of AI authors on the future of AI. Arxiv:2401.02843. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.02843

Growiec, J. (2022a). Accelerating economic growth: lessons from 200 000 years of technological progress and human development. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07195-9

Growiec, J. (2022b). Automation, partial and full. Macroeconomic Dynamics, 26(7), 1731–1755. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1365100521000031

Growiec, J. (2023). What will drive global economic growth in the digital age? Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, 27(3), 335–354. https://doi.org/10.1515/snde-2021-0079

Gruetzemacher, R. & Whittlestone, J. (2021). The transformative potential of artificial intelligence. Arxiv:1912.00747. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1912.00747

Hanson, R., & Yudkowsky, E. (2013). The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-foom debate. Machine Intelligence Research Institute. https://intelligence.org/files/AIFoomDebate.pdf

Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Vintage.

Hawking, S., Russell, S., Tegmark, M., & Wilczek, F. (2014, May 1). Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we taking AI seriously enough?’. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html

Hendrycks, D. (2023). Natural selection favors AIs over humans. Arxiv: 2303.16200v4. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.16200

Hilbert, M., & López, P. (2011). The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information. Science, 332(6205), 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1200970

Hilton, B. (2022). Preventing an AI-related catastrophe. 80 000 Hours. https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/

Johansen, A. & Sornette, D. (2001). Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population, economic and financial indices. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 294(3–4), 465–502. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00105-4

Jones, C. I. (2023). The AI dilemma: Growth versus existential risk (Working Paper No. 31837). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31837

Klump, R., McAdam, P., & Willman, A. (2012). The normalized CES production function: Theory and empirics. Journal of Economic Surveys, 26(5), 769–799. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6419.2012.00730.x

Korinek, A. (2023). Language models and cognitive automation for economic research. (Working Paper No. 30957). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w30957

Korinek, A., & Juelfs, M. (2022). Preparing for the (non-existent?) future of work. In J. B. Bullock, Y.-C. Chen, J. Himmelreich, V. M. Hudson, A. Korinek, M. M. Young, & B. Zhang (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of AI governance. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197579329.013.44

Kosinski, M. (2023). Theory of mind may have spontaneously emerged in large language models. Arxiv: 2302.02083. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.02083

Krakovna, V., Uesato, J., Mikulik, V., Rahtz, M., Everitt, T., Kumar, R., Kenton, Z., Leike, J., & Legg, S. (2020, April 21). Specification gaming: The flip side of AI ingenuity. DeepMind. https://www.deepmind.com/blog/specification-gaming-the-flip-side-of-ai-ingenuity

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near: When humans Transcend biology. Penguin.

Leike, J., & Sutskever, I. (2023, July 5). Introducing superalignment. OpenAI. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment

Martin, I., & Pindyck, R. S. (2015). Averting catastrophes: The strange economics of Scylla and Charybdis. American Economic Review, 105(10), 2947–2985. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20140806

McAskill, W. (2022). What we owe the future: A million-year view. Basic Books.

Milanovic, B. (2016). Global inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674969797

Muehlhauser, L., & Salamon, A. (2012). Intelligence explosion: Evidence and import. In A. Eden, J. Soraker, J. H. Moor, & E. Steinhart (Eds.), Singularity hypotheses: A scientific and philosophical assessment (pp. 15–42). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32560-1_2

Nagy, B., Farmer, J. D., Trancik, J. E., & Gonzales, J. P. (2011). Superexponential long-term trends in information technology. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 78(8), 1356–1364. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2011.07.006

Nordhaus, W. D. (2021). Are we approaching an economic singularity? Information technology and the future of economic growth. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 13(1), 299–332. https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20170105

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2024). Real GDP long term forecast. OECD. https://data.oecd.org/gdp/real-gdp-long-term-forecast.htm

OpenAI, Achiam, J., Adler, S., Agarwal, S., Ahmad, L., Akkaya, I., Aleman, F. L., Almeida, D., Altenschmidt, J., Altman, S., Anadkat, S., Avila, R., Babuschkin, I., Balaji, S., Balcom, V., Baltescu, P., Bao, H., Bavarian, M., Belgum, J. …, Zoph, B. (2023). GPT-4 technical report. Arxiv: 2303.08774. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.08774

Ord, T. (2020). The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity. Hachette.

Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford University Press. https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Reasons%20and%20persons.pdf

Parteka, A., & Kordalska, A. (2023). Artificial intelligence and productivity: Global evidence from AI patent and bibliometric data. Technovation, 125, Article 102764. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2023.102764

Phillips, P. J., Hahn, C. A., Fontana, P. C., Yates, A. N., Greene, K., Broniatowski, D. A., & Przybocki, D. A. (2021). Four principles of explainable artificial intelligence. National Institute of Standards and Technology. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8312

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674369542

Rees, M. (2003). Our final hour: A scientist’s warning – How terror, error, and environmental disaster threaten humankind’s future in this century – On Earth and beyond. Basic Books.

Romer, P. M. (1990). Endogenous technological change. Journal of Political Economy, 98(5). https://doi.org/10.1086/261725

Roodman, D. (2020, November 21). On the probability distribution of long-term changes in the growth rate of the global economy: An outside view. Open Philanthropy. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/default/files/Modeling-the-human-trajectory.pdf

Roser, M. (2022). The future is vast – what does this mean for our own life? Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/the-future-is-vast

Roser, M. (2023). AI timelines: What do experts in artificial intelligence expect for the future? Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

Russell, S. (2014, November 14). Of myths and moonshine. Reply to: The myth of AI. A conversation with Jaron Lanier. https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai

Sandberg, A., & Bostrom, N. (2008). Global catastrophic risks survey (Technical report #2008-1). Oxford University, Future of Humanity Institute. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reports/2008-1.pdf

Sevilla, J., Heim, L., Ho, A., Besiroglu, T., Hobbhahn, M., & Villalobos, P. (2022, July 18–23). Compute trends across three eras of machine learning. In Proceedings of the 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Padua, Italy. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9891914

Solow, R. M. (1987). We’d better watch out. New York Times Book Review.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 19–136). Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195060232.003.0002

Torres, E. P. (2022, September 10). Selling “longtermism”: How PR and marketing drive a controversial new movement. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2022/09/10/selling-longtermism-how-pr-and-marketing-drive-a-controversial-new-movement/

Trammell, P. (2021). Existential risk and exogenous growth. Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. https://philiptrammell.com/static/ExistentialRiskAndExogenousGrowth.pdf

Trammell, P., & Korinek, A. (2020). Economic growth under transformative AI (Working Paper No. 8). Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Philip-Trammell-and-Anton-Korinek_economic-growth-under-transformative-ai.pdf

United Nations. (2022). World population prospects 2022. https://population.un.org/wpp/

Wei, J., Tay, Y., Bommasani, R., Raffel, C., Zoph, B., Borgeaud, S., Yogatama, D., Bosma, M., Zhou, D., Metzler, D., Chi, E. H., Hashimoto, T., Vinyals, O., Liang, P., Dean, J., & Fedus, W. (2022). Emergent abilities of large language models. Arxiv: 2206.07682. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.07682

World Economic Forum. (2023). Global cybersecurity outlook 2023 (Insight report). https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Security_Outlook_Report_2023.pdf

Yudkowsky, E. (2004). Coherent extrapolated volition. The Singularity Institute, San Francisco, CA. https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf

Yudkowsky, E. (2007). Pascal’s mugging: Tiny probabilities of vast utilities. Less Wrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a5JAiTdytou3Jg749/pascal-s-mugging-tiny-probabilities-of-vast-utilities

Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Artificial intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk. In N. Bostrom & M. M. Ćirković (Eds.), Global catastrophic risks (pp. 308–345). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198570509.003.0021

Yudkowsky, E. (2017). There’s no fire alarm for artificial general intelligence. Machine Intelligence Research Institute. https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

Yudkowsky, E. (2022). MIRI announces new “Death with dignity” strategy. Less Wrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy