You can't just extrapolate recent AI progress into an automation date
Ege Erdil, Tamay BesirogluAGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besirogluat 3:00
From the conversation
Just shade Ege's predictions by five years or by 20% or something. Why? Because we've seen so much progress over even the last few years. We've gone from Chat GPT two years ago to now we have models that can literally do reasoning, are better coders than me, and I studied software engineering in college. I mean, I did become a podcaster, I'm not saying I'm the best coder in the world. But if you made this much progress in the last two years, why would it take another 30 to get to full automation of remote work? So I think that a lot of people have this intuition that progress has been very fast. They look at the trend lines and just extrapolate; obviously, it's going to happen in, I don't know, 2027 or 2030 or whatever. They're just very bullish. And obviously, that's not a thing you can literally do. There isn't a trend you can literally extrapolate of “when do we get to full automation?”. Because if you look at the fraction of the economy that is actually automated by AI, it's very small. So if you just extrapolate that trend, which is something, say, Robin Hanson likes to do, you're going to say, “well, it's going to take centuries” or something. Now, we don't agree with that view. But I think one way of thinking about this is how many big things are there?…
Summary
Recent AI progress—from ChatGPT to models capable of reasoning and outperforming college-trained coders—leads many observers to intuit that timelines to full automation of remote work should be short, not decades away. This intuition drives skepticism toward longer forecasts like a 30-year timeline, with the implicit argument that sustaining even a fraction of the recent pace of progress would get there much sooner.
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