“Five Hinge‑Questions That Decide Whether AGI Is Five Years Away or Twenty” by charlieoneill

For people who care about falsifiable stakes rather than vibes

TL;DR

All timeline arguments ultimately turn on five quantitative pivots. Pick optimistic answers to three of them and your median forecast collapses into the 2026–2029 range; pick pessimistic answers to any two and you drift past 2040. The pivots (I think) are:

1. Which empirical curve matters (hardware spend, algorithmic efficiency, or revenue)
2. Whether software‑only recursive self‑improvement (RSI) can accelerate capabilities faster than hardware can be installed.
3. How sharply compute translates into economic value once broad “agentic” reliability is reached.
4. Whether automating half of essential tasks ignites runaway growth or whether Baumol's law keeps aggregate productivity anchored until all bottlenecks fall
5. How much alignment fear, regulation, and supply‑chain friction slow scale‑up

The rest of this post traces how the canonical short‑timeline narrative AI 2027 and the long‑timeline essays by Ege Erdil and Zhendong Zheng + Arjun Ramani diverge on each hinge [...]

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Outline:

(00:16) TL;DR

(01:31) Shared premises

(01:57) Hinge #1: Which curve do we extrapolate?

(04:00) Hinge #2: Can software‑only recursive self‑improvement outrun atoms?

(06:07) Hinge #3: How efficient (and how sudden) is the leap from compute to economic value?

(07:34) Hinge #4: Must we automate everything, or is half enough?

(08:56) Hinge #5: Alignment‑driven and institutional drag

(10:10) Dependency Structure

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
May 6th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45oxYwysFiqwfKCcN/untitled-draft-keg3

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.