What are the potential benefits of advanced AI?

AI could enable hugely beneficial advancements if it is managed with enough foresight and care. Advanced AI could help us:

• Automate many tasks and lead to an explosion in production and wealth, possibly leading to a post-scarcity society of abundance, leisure, and flourishing, free of poverty and tedium.

• Improve our ability to understand and manipulate complex biological systems. For instance, DeepMind’s AlphaFold has made great strides towards solving the protein-folding problem. Further improvements could lead to:

  • Improved human health and longevity.

  • Enhanced agriculture.

• Solve many engineering problem, for instance:

  • Creating an abundance of cheap energy through, e.g., nuclear fusion.

  • Solving global warming using such cheap energy or other means like affordable carbon capture.

  • Enabling space colonization.

The field of AI existential safety was founded by people inspired by the bright futures AI could help us reach, and wants to ensure that humanity avoids the existential risks that would bar us from those futures.