How should we navigate explosive AI progress?

AI that can accelerate research could drive a century of technological progress over just a few years. During such a period, new technological or political developments will raise consequential and hard-to-reverse decisions, in rapid succession. We call these developments grand challenges.

These challenges include new weapons of mass destruction, AI-enabled autocracies, races to grab offworld resources, and digital beings worthy of moral consideration, as well as opportunities to dramatically improve quality of life and collective decision-making.

We argue that these challenges cannot always be delegated to future AI systems, and suggest things we can do today to meaningfully improve our prospects. AGI preparedness is therefore not just about ensuring that advanced AI systems are aligned: we should be preparing, now, for the disorienting range of developments an intelligence explosion would bring.

If there is an international project to build artificial general intelligence (“AGI”), how should it be designed? Existing scholarship has looked to historical models for inspiration, often suggesting the Manhattan Project or CERN as the closest analogues. But AGI is a fundamentally general-purpose technology, and is likely to be used primarily for commercial purposes rather than military or scientific ones.

This report presents an under-discussed alternative: Intelsat, an international organization founded to establish and own the global satellite communications system. We show that Intelsat is proof of concept that a multilateral project to build a commercially and strategically important technology is possible and can achieve intended objectives—providing major benefits to both the US and its allies compared to the US acting alone. We conclude that ‘Intelsat for AGI’ is a valuable complement to existing models of AGI governance.

There have been recent discussions of centralizing western AGI development, for instance through a Manhattan Project for AI. But there has been little analysis of whether centralizing would actually be a good idea. In this piece, we explore the strategic implications of having one project instead of several. We think that it’s very unclear whether centralizing would be good or bad overall. We tentatively guess that centralizing would be bad because it would increase risks from power concentration. We argue that future work should focus on increasing the expected quality of either a centralized or multiple projects, rather than increasing the likelihood of a centralized project.

I show how a standard argument for advancing progress is extremely sensitive to how humanity’s story eventually ends. Whether advancing progress is ultimately good or bad depends crucially on whether it also advances the end of humanity. Because we know so little about the answer to this crucial question, the case for advancing progress is undermined. I suggest we must either overcome this objection through improving our understanding of these connections between progress and human extinction or switch our focus to advancing certain kinds of progress relative to others — changing where we are going, rather than just how soon we get there.

The long-term future of intelligent life is currently unpredictable and undetermined. We argue that the invention of artificial general intelligence (AGI) could change this by making extreme types of lock-in technologically feasible. In particular, we argue that AGI would make it technologically feasible to (i) perfectly preserve nuanced specifications of a wide variety of values or goals far into the future, and (ii) develop AGI-based institutions that would (with high probability) competently pursue any such values for at least millions, and plausibly trillions, of years.