We are often told that we should take predictions of those in the AI industry seriously because they have been right about so much. But here we need to make a distinction between two things:
Predicting that AI is going to get much better really fast
Predicting that AI is going to transform the world
I think that those who’ve argued for 1 have clearly been correct. There’s a long record of forecasts along the lines of “AI will never do X,” and then it does X. That said, this makes the lack of disruptive change even more puzzling. Where is the growth? The job loss? The radical impacts in our day-to-day lives? How much longer do we have to wait for these things?