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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conjecture internal survey | AGI timelines and estimations of probability of human extinction from unaligned AGI, published by Maris Sala on May 22, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.We put together a survey to study the opinions of timelines and probability of human extinction of the employees at Conjecture. The questions were based on previous public surveys and prediction markets, to ensure that the results are comparable with people’s opinions outside of Conjecture.The survey results were polled in April, 2023. There were 23 unique responses from people across teams.Section 1. Probability of human extinction from AISetup and limitationsThe specific questions the survey asked were:What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?What probability do A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species in general (not just because inability to control, but also stuff like people intentionally using AI systems in harmful ways)?The difference between the two questions is that the first focuses on risk from misalignment, whereas the second captures risk from misalignment and misuse.The main caveats of these questions are the following:The questions were not explicitly time bound. I'd expect differences in people’s estimates of risk of extinction this century, in the next 1000 years, and anytime in the future. The longer of a timeframe we consider, the higher the values would be. I suspect employees were considering extinction risk roughly within this century when answering.The first question is a subset of the second question. One employee gave a higher probability for the second question than the first; this was probably a misinterpretation.The questions factor in interventions such as how Conjecture and others’ safety work will impact extinction risk. The expectation is the numbers would be higher if factored out their own or others’ safety work.ResponsesOut of the 23 respondents, one rejected the premise, and two people did not respond to one of the two questions but answered the other one. The main issue respondents raised was answering without a time constraint.Generally, people estimate the extinction risk from autonomous AI / AI getting out of control to be quite high at Conjecture. The median estimation is 70% and the average estimation is 59%. The plurality estimates the risk to be between 60% to 80%. A few people believe extinction risk from AGI is higher than 80%.The second question surveying extinction risk from AI in general, which includes misalignment and misuse. The median estimate is 80% and the average is 71%. The plurality estimates the risk to be over 80%.Section 2. When will we have AGI?Setup and limitationsFor this question, we asked respondents to predict when AGI will be built using this specification used on Metaculus, enabling us to compare to the community baseline (Figure 3).The respondents were instructed to toggle with the probability density as seen in Figure 4. This was a deliberate choice to enable differences in confidence towards lower or higher values in uncertainty.The main caveats of this question were:The responses are probably anchored to the Metaculus community prediction. The community prediction is 2031: 8 year timelines. Conjecture responses centering around a similar prediction should not come as a surprise.The question allows for a prediction that AGI is already here. It’s unclear that respondents paid close attention to their lower and upper predictions to ensure that both are accordingly sensible. They probably focused on making their median prediction accurate, and might not have noticed how that affected lower and u...