The Future is Constructed, Not Predicted

Shortly after the AI 2027 report was released, my friend Saffron posted a tweet/mini-blog in response:

Looking to “accurately” predict AI outcomes is… highly counterproductive for good outcomes.

The researchers aim for predictive accuracy and make a big deal of their credentials in forecasting and research. (Although they obscure the actual research, wrapping this up with lots of very specific narrative.) This creates an intended illusion, especially for the majority of people who haven’t thought much about AI, that the near term scenarios are basically inevitable--they claim they are so objective, and good at forecasting!

Why implicitly frame it as inevitable if they explicitly say (buried in a footnote in the “What is this?” info box) that they hope that this scenario does not come to pass? Why not draw attention to points of leverage for human agency in this future, if they *actually* want this scenario to not come to pass?

I, too, was somewhat confused about the report, to put it lightly, and wanted to talk through it together. We try to understand the report and forecasting in general, and our conversation turns out to be less of an AI 2027 hate train than we initially thought!

By the end, we end up coalescing around these three ideas: (1) the very act of prediction has an impact on the future; (2) ideally, forecasts should be empowering, rather than disempowering; (3) evaluating forecasts is messy business, so the intentions of the forecasters matter.

— Jessica

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