Enough AI (eventually)
AI will expand capabilities incrementally, but we should expect more: enough AI to replace systems at the scale of industries, with potentially swift and disruptive effects.
Anticipated timelines vary widely, yet highly capable AI has become a mainstream expectation. Beyond a soft threshold of AI capability — in both level and scope — swift deployment of a vast range of new, scalable technological capabilities will become possible. A lot may happen quickly, whether or not this happens soon.
To understand their potential implications, AI capabilities must be considered in combination with what they enable. Combinations of capabilities are important: Some create new problems, while others enable new solutions, and combinations of capabilities cascade to enable more.
Think of AI capabilities as a knob controlling feasible applications, a knob that turns only toward “more”. Some questions of feasibility become simpler when the knob is turned far enough, because complex dependencies become less important.
Production technologies are a key example. Production today relies on supply chains that employ a host of different machines to make a host of different components: Consider a cellphone, the complexity of its parts, and the complexity of manufacturing them, chips and all the rest. Now consider the vastly greater aggregate complexity of the processes and factories that make those components.
A great improvement in part of a process may have little effect on the whole: If AI cuts the cost of 1/10th of a production system by 90%, the cost of the whole drops by only 9%. And if AI increases the potential throughput of part of a system by a factor of 100, gains are likely to be negligible because of bottlenecks elsewhere.
How far must the AI knob turn to slash costs deeply and radically increase system capacity? Either far enough to improve almost all parts, or far enough to replace the system as a whole.1
These considerations have implications for the trajectory of progress: We should expect a soft threshold at which incremental changes accelerate and combine to yield deeply transformative change.
Expect widespread surprise and plan work with it.
The difficulty of piecemeal upgrades may tip the balance from incremental change to wholesale replacement. It’s sometimes easier to start fresh.