San Francisco Consensus

Contextual Quote

Conor McGlynn:

"Last April, 600 people gathered for a technology policy conference in downtown Washington, DC. The main speaker, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, laid out what he called the “San Francisco consensus”: the view that “within three to five years, we’ll have what is called artificial general intelligence,” which will be able to extend its own capabilities without needing input from human beings. This development, according to the consensus, could bring considerable benefits, but also risks bringing about human extinction. The challenge of getting to one by avoiding the other, Schmidt explained, “is called the ‘eye of the needle’ problem. You need to get through this eye of the needle without killing yourself and killing everybody else, to get to this promised land of AI.”

In this statement, Schmidt summed up a common way of understanding AI progress. We are developing more and more powerful AI systems that pose extreme risks, but also promise great benefits. The AI community is colloquially divided between “doomers” and “boomers,” but the two groups don’t differ on the promised land so much as in their confidence in our ability to make it through the eye of the needle.

Regardless of where they fall on this spectrum, those who regard the AGI future as a potential “promised land” tend to argue that their predictions have an entirely rational basis. They are, they tell us, merely making logical extrapolations from observable trends. The work of Lewis Mumford, one of the twentieth century’s most caustic critics of technology, offers an alternative perspective: that such assumptions are rooted in a secular faith that lies behind the modern embrace of technological development."

(https://www.compactmag.com/article/ai-and-the-myth-of-the-machine/)