What will be some of the most impactful applications of advanced AI in the near term?

(EA Librarian)

You can look at the "timelines" section of MetaculusExtras and scroll through the period of interest to see the relevant Metaculus forecasts. There is no way to exclude questions unrelated to AI, so you'll have to do the filtering manually. Very few people seem to be aware of this resource, but I think it's pretty helpful for allowing one to form a more concrete and accurate picture of what the future will be like in the coming years/decades.

Paul Christiano thinks there's a 1/3 chance Tesla gets fully self-driving cars by 2024, and expects that conditional on that their market cap has probably >tripled to >$3T. that's pretty insane commercial value right there.

In scientific applications, one obvious thought is advances on AlphaFold that enable better drug design. I'm not a domain expert, but I think that might require significant improvements from AlphaFold v2-- moving beyond crystal structure prediction to in-solution structure prediction and to protein-protein interaction modeling. 

I've heard from two casual programmer friends that AI programming assistants like Github Copilot are impressively good. They make it easier to write various finicky pieces of code, and help fix bugs. It seems to me like this could be really impactful if it turns out to help professional programmers; there's a lot of value to add, and potentially this could be turned towards AI programming itself...

Personally, I have been using ML to make art, help me write short stories and suggest alternative ways of framing the abstracts in my papers.

I expect these applications will become way better soon, and become a staple as they are integrated in text editors like Word.

I think its likely (60%) that a major text editor will by 2026 have a language model making online suggestions, and plausibly an option to generate an appropriate image to be inserted in the middle of the document.

I just remembered there was this post from Daniel Kokotajilo over at LessWrong/Alignment Forum a while back.

The AI Tracker team has been tracking some potential (mis)uses of cutting-edge AI.

these include phising, social media manipulation, disinformation campaigns, harassment and blackmail, surveillance, cyberattacks, evidence fabrication, bioweapon development and denial-of-service attacks.