I don't think there's any doubt that this will happen eventually. For it to happen this decade would mean that AI is pretty fundamentally different from other tech -- personal computers, smartphones, the internet, electricity, radio, plastic. For all of those, it took longer than 5-10 years to reach life-changing-for-muggles levels of saturation, right? What's the closest to a historical precedent for this?

To be clear, when AI becomes AGI, that just really is fundamentally different than any other technology. But assuming no AGI that soon, how realistic is a YES here?

What would you define as "everyone actually using" a new piece of AI tech? Probably not< 50% of the population, so like 60%? For reference, about 90% of people have a smartphone today.

@DanNelson88fb Good question. I haven't pinned down percentages yet but in another comment thread here I suggested using the adoption of the internet in the US in the year 2000 and the adoption of smartphones in 2010 as benchmarks. So I'd say we don't have to get to ubiquity, but common enough to be clear it's heading that way.

Question: in which years would hypothetical bets on similar terms but about smartphones or about the internet instead of AI have resolved YES for the first time?

@zzq Ooh, great question. Off the cuff, I'd say 2000 for the internet and 2010 for smartphones. But the impact diffused slowly enough that it's very hard to pick a specific year. This suggests we have work to do in pinning down the resolution criteria here.

EDIT: bogus link! I was confusing it with this: https://manifold.markets/ScottAlexander/in-2028-will-an-ai-be-able-to-gener Which is trading much closer to this market.

https://manifold.markets/SamuelKnoche/in-early-2028-will-an-ai-be-able-to-2x8ud6ld4f

"Full high quality movie to a prompt" by 2028 is trading higher than this market.

I'm interested to know if people really think a world is likely where AI gets that capable and still remains largely a cool trick that's used by nerds.

In early 2028, will an AI be able to generate a full high-quality movie to a prompt?

44% chance. EG "make me a 120 minute Star Trek / Star Wars crossover". It should be more or less comparable to a big-budget studio film, although it doesn't have to pass a full Turing Test as long as it's pretty good. The AI doesn't have to be available to the public, as long as it's confirmed to exist.

@BrendanJackman fair, but that market is radically mispriced imo

I think that Criterion #3 is the tricky one. I know people who have gone without smart phones for a least a period of time and they are fine. For example, if most people are using AIs in the same way that they use Google to search these days - i.e. to ask questions, write emails - would that count? That seems like sort of an extension/improvement of what we have today, not really a phase transition in the same way that the internet was. Something on the scale of the internet would make sense to me as something one truly could not ignore though. I don't know anyone who has gone without the internet recently.

Also what counts as "a whole category" of jobs? E.g. would call center jobs count? Or are we talking bigger scale, like accounting.

Disagree with the premise when it comes to younger people. Essentially every college and high school student is already using LLMs. It’s not niche at all.

@LiamZ Very fair comment. I think I'll hedge that first sentence a bit better. (Currently: "AI is already somewhat life-changing for us nerds but normal humans are largely ignoring it so far.")

In any case, this is about predicting how much further it goes, defined by whether normal people can choose to ignore it. I mean, you can ignore anything if you try hard enough, so we're using smartphones / the internet as the benchmark. So maybe a 7.5 on the technological richter scale: https://forum.beeminder.com/t/more-fake-ai-podcasts-about-beeminder/11936/4?u=dreev

Doubling vs now or doubling vs some projection?

Would dramatic changes to pedagogy count?

@Juniper0rg1m Great questions; Svata and I shall discuss!

@Juniper0rg1m I mean hypothetically, if God came down from the heavens and said "AI will suddenly and immediately double everyone's productivity in 2040", the stock markets would immediately jump in anticipation of this new productivity minus the discount rate of 15 years. Right? So then when productivity did double, we wouldn't see a similarly discontinous jump in asset prices.

So what if that's already happened, and we don't see a discontinous doubling of the economy now because it's already priced in?

Well, productivity numbers are published, so we could be sensitive to that. But we could also just compare to a long term growth trend. I.e. if GDP in 2030 is about what you'd expect from an extrapolation of 1970-2000, I wouldn't call that life changing

@Juniper0rg1m If, in 1970, you assigned a 40% chance of Futurama by 2030, and then increased your confidence by 1 percentage point each year, you'd be 100% confident of Futurama by 2030 by the time 2030 rolled around, but the 2030 gdp would be what you expected extrapolating the trend from 1970-2000.

@GG I don't think we started pricing in AI before 2000 in any meaningful sense. Also I don't think GDP will have anything priced into on the same way it would be in the stock market. It's dependent on actual economic activity. (With caviats relating to the notional value of some assets being transacted)