What will be left for us to work on?

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul last week titled “What will be left for us to work on?” I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available here, annotated with a lightly edited transcript. You can also view them below right here on this page, but the online version has animations, clickable links, and a much nicer experience overall.

I made three arguments. First, the AI as Normal Technology framework is a correct and useful as a way to think about AI’s impacts, unless and until there is some future discontinuity such as through recursive self-improvement. Second, even though we should take recursive self-improv…