LW - AI and the Technological Richter Scale by Zvi

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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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: AI and the Technological Richter Scale, published by Zvi on September 4, 2024 on LessWrong.
The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver's new book On the Edge.
A full review is in the works (note to prediction markets: this post alone does NOT on its own count as a review, but this counts as part of a future review), but this concept seems highly useful, stands on its own and I want a reference post for it. Nate skips around his chapter titles and timelines, so why not do the same here?
Defining the Scale
Nate Silver, On the Edge (location 8,088 on Kindle): The Richter scale was created by the physicist Charles Richter in 1935 to quantify the amount of energy released by earthquakes.
It has two key features that I'll borrow for my Technological Richter Scale (TRS). First, it is logarithmic. A magnitude 7 earthquake is actually ten times more powerful than a mag 6. Second, the frequency of earthquakes is inversely related to their Richter magnitude - so 6s occur about ten times more often than 7s. Technological innovations can also produce seismic disruptions.
Let's proceed quickly through the lower readings of the Technological Richter Scale.
1. Like a half-formulated thought in the shower.
2. Is an idea you actuate, but never disseminate: a slightly better method to brine a chicken that only you and your family know about.
3. Begins to show up in the official record somewhere, an idea you patent or make a prototype of.
4. An invention successful enough that somebody pays for it; you sell it commercially or someone buys the IP.
5. A commercially successful invention that is important in its category, say, Cool Ranch Doritos, or the leading brand of windshield wipers.
6. An invention can have a broader societal impact, causing a disruption within its field and some ripple effects beyond it. A TRS 6 will be on the short list for technology of the year. At the low end of the 6s (a TRS 6.0) are clever and cute inventions like Post-it notes that provide some mundane utility. Toward the high end (a 6.8 or 6.9) might be something like the VCR, which disrupted home entertainment and had knock-on effects on the movie industry. The impact escalates quickly from there.
7. One of the leading inventions of the decade and has a measurable impact on people's everyday lives. Something like credit cards would be toward the lower end of the 7s, and social media a high 7.
8. A truly seismic invention, a candidate for technology of the century, triggering broadly disruptive effects throughout society. Canonical examples include automobiles, electricity, and the internet.
9. By the time we get to TRS 9, we're talking about the most important inventions of all time, things that inarguably and unalterably changed the course of human history. You can count these on one or two hands. There's fire, the wheel, agriculture, the printing press. Although they're something of an odd case, I'd argue that nuclear weapons belong here also.
True, their impact on daily life isn't necessarily obvious if you're living in a superpower protected by its nuclear umbrella (someone in Ukraine might feel differently). But if we're thinking in expected-value terms, they're the first invention that had the potential to destroy humanity.
10. Finally, a 10 is a technology that defines a new epoch, one that alters not only the fate of humanity but that of the planet. For roughly the past twelve thousand years, we have been in the Holocene, the geological epoch defined not by the origin of Homo sapiens per se but by humans becoming the dominant species and beginning to alter the shape of the Earth with our technologies.
AI wresting control of this dominant position from humans would qualify as a 10, as would other forms of a "technological singularity," a term popularized by...