At the beginning of 2017, someone I deeply trusted said they thought AGI would come in 10 years, with 50% probability.

I didn't take their opinion at face value, especially since so many experts seemed confident that AGI was decades away. But the possibility of imminent apocalypse seemed plausible enough and important enough that I decided to prioritize investigating AGI timelines over trying to strike gold. I left the VC-backed startup I'd cofounded, and went around talking to every smart and sensible person I could find who seemed to have opinions about when humanity would develop AGI.

My biggest takeaways after 3 years might be disappointing -- I don't think the considerations currently available to us point to any decisive conclusion one way or another, and I don't think anybody really knows when AGI is coming. At the very least, the fields of knowledge that I think bear on AGI forecasting (including deep learning, predictive coding, and comparative neuroanatomy) are disparate, and I don't know of any careful and measured thinkers with all the relevant expertise.

That being said, I did manage to identify a handful of background variables that consistently play significant roles in informing people's intuitive estimates of when we'll get to AGI. In other words, people would often tell me that their estimates of AGI timelines would significantly change if their views on one of these background variables changed.

I've put together a framework for understanding AGI timelines based on these background variables. Among all the frameworks for AGI timelines I've encountered, it's the framework that most comprehensively enumerates crucial considerations for AGI timelines, and it's the framework that best explains how smart and sensible people might arrive at vastly different views on AGI timelines.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll publish a series of posts about these background variables and some considerations that shed light on what their values are. I'll conclude by describing my framework for how they come together to explain various overall viewpoints on AGI timelines, depending on different prior assumptions on the values of these variables.

By trade, I'm a math competition junkie, an entrepreneur, and a hippie. I am not an expert on any of the topics I'll be writing about -- m...

Crucial Considerations

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