<span style="color:#323232;">Exponential Growth (25+ individuals): Most expect rapid, continued growth over the next 8-15 years, often linked to advancements in technology and AI's integration into various sectors.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Logarithmic Growth (17+ individuals): Many foresee significant early advancements that will gradually plateau, influenced by ethical, societal, and practical challenges.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">S-curve Growth (8 individuals): A few predict periods of rapid innovation followed by a stabilization as AI reaches maturity or encounters insurmountable hurdles.
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This role-played synthesis suggests a general optimism for the near to mid-term future of AI, with a consensus leaning towards exponential growth, though moderated by practical, ethical, and societal considerations.
Given the various perspectives offered by the panel on the initial phase of AI growth, let’s extend the reasoning to speculate about what might happen beyond the next 8-15 years:
<span style="color:#323232;">Those predicting Exponential Growth (indefinite), like Larry Page, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, might suggest that AI growth could continue to escalate without a foreseeable plateau. They likely envision ongoing, transformative innovations that continuously push the boundaries of AI capabilities.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Those foreseeing Exponential Growth for a finite period (e.g., Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis) might anticipate a shift after the initial rapid growth phase. After the high-growth years, they might predict a transition to a slower, more sustainable growth pattern or a plateau as the AI industry matures and technological advancements face diminishing returns or run up against theoretical and practical limitations.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Proponents of Logarithmic Growth, like Ian Goodfellow, Daphne Koller, and Safiya Noble, generally expect growth to slow and eventually plateau. Post the initial period of significant advancements, they might predict that the AI field will stabilize, focusing more on refinement and integration rather than groundbreaking innovations. Ethical, regulatory, and societal constraints could increasingly play a role in moderating the speed of development.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Advocates of S-curve Growth, such as Gary Marcus and Peter Thiel, typically envision that after a period of rapid innovation, growth will not only plateau but could potentially decline if new disruptive innovations do not emerge. They might see the field settling into a phase where AI technology becomes a standard part of the technological landscape, with incremental improvements rather than revolutionary changes.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">Special Considerations: Visionaries like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who speculate about AI reaching superintelligence levels, might argue that post-15 years, the landscape could be radically different, potentially dominated by new AI paradigms or even AI surpassing human intelligence in many areas, which could either lead to a new phase of explosive growth or require significant new governance frameworks to manage the implications.
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Overall, the panel’s consensus beyond the next 8-15 years would likely reflect a mixture of continued growth at a moderated pace, potential plateaus as practical limits are reached, and a landscape increasingly shaped by ethical, societal, and regulatory considerations. Some may also entertain the possibility of a decline if no new significant innovations emerge.