✨🔬 Acceleration though AI-automated R&D: My chat (+transcript) with researcher Tom Davidson

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

What really gets AI optimists excited isn’t the prospect of automating customer service departments or human resources. Imagine, rather, what might happen to the pace of scientific progress if AI becomes a super research assistant. Tom Davidson’s new paper, How Quick and Big Would a Software Intelligence Explosion Be?, explores that very scenario.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Davidson about what it would mean for automated AI researchers to rapidly improve their own algorithms, thus creating a self-reinforcing loop of innovation. We talk about the economic effects of self-improving AI research and how close we are to that reality.

Davidson is a senior research fellow at Forethought, where he explores AI and explosive growth. He was previously a senior research fellow at Open Philanthropy and a research scientist at the UK government’s AI Security Institute.

In This Episode

• Making human minds (1:43)

• Theory to reality (6:45)

• The world with automated research (10:59)

• Considering constraints (16:30)

• Worries and what-ifs (19:07)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Making human minds (1:43)

Pethokoukis: A few years ago, you wrote a paper called “Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?,” which argued that growth could accelerate dramatically if AI would start generating ideas the way human researchers once did. In your view, population growth historically powered kind of an ideas feedback loop. More people meant more researchers meant more ideas, rising incomes, but that loop broke after the demographic transition in the late-19th century but you suggest that AI could restart it: more ideas, more output, more AI, more ideas. Does this new paper in a way build upon that paper? “How quick and big would a software intelligence explosion be?”

The first paper you referred to is about the biggest-picture dynamic of economic growth. As you said, throughout the long run history, when we produced more food, the population increased. That additional output transferred itself into more people, more workers. These days that doesn’t happen. When GDP goes up, that doesn’t mean people have more kids. In fact,