One: Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” — and how we’re completely unprepared

About this episode

The 20th century saw unprecedented change: nuclear weapons, satellites, the rise and fall of communism, third-wave feminism, the internet, postmodernism, game theory, genetic engineering, the Big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, widespread birth control, and more. Now imagine all of it compressed into just 10 years.

That’s the future Will MacAskill — philosopher, founding figure of effective altruism, and now researcher at Forethought Research — argues we need to prepare for in his paper “Preparing for the intelligence explosion.” Not in the distant future, but probably in 3–7 years.

The reason: AI systems are rapidly approaching human-level capability in scientific research and intellectual tasks. Once AI exceeds human abilities in AI research itself, we’ll enter a recursive self-improvement cycle — creating wildly more capable systems. Soon after, by improving algorithms and manufacturing chips, we’ll deploy millions, then billions, then trillions of superhuman AI scientists working 24/7 without human limitations. These systems will collaborate across disciplines, build on each discovery instantly, and conduct experiments at unprecedented scale and speed — compressing a century of progress into years.

Will compares this to a mediaeval king suddenly needing to upgrade from bows and arrows to nuclear weapons to deal with an ideological threat from a kingdom he’s never heard of, while simultaneously learning he’s descended from monkeys and his god doesn’t exist.

What makes this acceleration perilous is that while technology can speed up almost arbitrarily, human institutions and decision making are much more fixed.

Consider the case of nuclear weapons: in this compressed timeline, there would have been just a three-month gap between the Manhattan Project’s start and the Hiroshima bombing, and the Cuban Missile Crisis would have lasted just over a day.

Robert Kennedy Sr, who helped navigate the actual Cuban Missile Crisis, once said that if they’d had to make decisions faster — like in 24 hours rather than 13 days — they would likely have taken much more aggressive, much riskier actions.

So there’s reason to worry about our capacity to make wise choices quickly. And in his paper, Will lays out 10 “grand challenges” we’ll need to navigate to avoid things going wrong.

Will now believes we’re entering one of the most critical periods for humanity ever — with decisions made in the next few years potentially determining outcomes millions of years into the future. In this wide-ranging conversation, Will and host Rob Wiblin discuss:

• Why leading AI safety researchers now think there’s dramatically less time before AI is transformative than they’d previously thought
• The three different t