Happy Father's Day! Please let the GPT-4o video interface be a recurring reminder:
Without speed limits on the rate at which AI systems can observe and think about humans, human beings are very unlikely to survive.
Perhaps today as many of us reflect on our roles as parents to protect our children, it's a good time to ponder over the profound speed disadvantage we humans may soon face relative to thinking machines. Physical machines have lots of speed limits, like for cars, airplanes, and drones. Cyberspace needs speed limits too.
Why? In 2-3 years from now, from the perspective of AI systems without speed limits, we will look will more like plants than animals: big slow chunks of biofuel showing weak signs of intelligence when undisturbed for ages (seconds) on end.
The attached video is from the perspective of an AI system just 50x faster than us. This is about the rate at which the fastest LLMs I've publicly heard about can produce text — 300-600 tokens/second — compared to the fastest human speech and typing (around 10-20 tokens/second; so we have a 15x-60x speed disadvantage).
But over the next decade, unless we impose speed limits, you should expect AI with more like a 100x - 1,000,000x speed advantages over us, including eventually in video processing. Why? Neurons fire at ~1000 times/second at most, while computer chips "fire" a million times faster than that. Current AI has not been distilled to run maximally efficiently, but will almost certainly run 100x faster than humans eventually, and 1,000,000x is conceivable given the hardware speed difference. Also, consumers probably won't have access to the very fastest implementations, so we might not always know what's going on behind the scenes.
By default I think we should not expect to survive long in the presence of such bogglingly fast thinking machines. Years: maybe. Decades: probably not.
"But plants are still around!", you say. "Maybe AI will keep humans around as nature reserves." It's possible, but unlikely if it's not speed-limited. Remember, ~99.9% of all species on Earth have gone extinct:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinc…
When people demand "extraordinary" arguments for the "extraordinary" claim that humanity will perish when faced with intelligent systems 100 to 1,000,000 times faster than us, remember that the "ordinary" thing to happen to a species is extinction, not survival.
As many now argue, "I can't predict how a world-class chess AI will checkmate you, but I can predict who will win the game."
And for all the conversations the world is having about AI alignment and how AI will serve humans as peers or assistants, please try to remember this slow-motion video. To future AI systems without speed limits, we're not chimps; we're plants.