Context

This is a place to explore visions of how AI can go really well. Conversations about AI (both in this community and disseminated by mainstream media) focus on dystopian scenarios and failure modes. Even communities that lean technoutopian (Silicon Valley) are having an AI hangover. More broadly, many people in my life think the future will be worse than the present and this makes me sad.

So I think it's time to revisit the science fiction books of our teenage years and imagine what amazing applications of AI or AGI in society looks like. AI that doesn’t destroy us is great. AI that unlocks human flourishing is even better. I've personally found it much easier to think of negative scenarios than positive scenarios, so this is me enlisting your help.

Discussion norms

I’d like this to be a yes-and, generative, bursty, collective brainstorming thread. Ideas that make no sense, that you might not endorse later, that you can't even explain or defend are all welcome. The person that starts the idea might not be the person that finishes it so don't censor too early.

I hope this discussion style shows us a different way to get to better reasoning: as opposed to one person contributing a well-developed position and others pointing out inconsistencies, we can build ideas collectively, with everyone contributing different parts. I also hope it encourages people who don’t normally participate on LessWrong to contribute their thoughts.

Prompts for idea generation

(Feel free to ignore and share whatever comes to mind)

What does AI going well look like?
If you feel pessimistic about the future, what vision of AI would make you feel more optimistic?
What are problems we don't know how to solve that you'd be excited to solve with AI?
What great companies could be built in the next decade, where the product is built primarily around modern Machine Learning? (If you find this prompt overly large, can you think of any companies that could be built around GPT-3?)

I’ll seed some of my ideas below :) Thanks Amanda, Ben, Andreas for discussing these ideas with me.

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