GPT-4 with simple engineering can predict the future around as well as crowds:
arxiv.org/abs/2402.18563
On hard questions, it can do better than crowds.
If these systems become extremely good at seeing the future, they could serve as an objective, accurate third-party. This would help us better anticipate the longterm consequences of our actions and make more prudent decisions.
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Asimov
I didn't write this paper, but we called for AI forecasting research in Unsolved Problems in ML Safety some years back (
arxiv.org/abs/2109.13916), and concretized as a research avenue a year later in Forecasting Future World Events with Neural Networks (
arxiv.org/abs/2206.15474). Hopefully AI companies will add this feature as the election season begins.