Benefits of AGI

While the primary focus is on mitigating risks, it's important to recognize the tremendous potential benefits that AGI could bring to humanity. These benefits motivate the development of AGI and underscore the importance of building it safely.

Overview of Benefits

Artificial General Intelligence promises transformative benefits across virtually every domain of human endeavor. Its capability to think, learn, and solve problems across multiple domains could help address some of humanity's most pressing challenges and unlock new possibilities for human flourishing.

Raising Living Standards Across the World

AGI, if deployed safely, widely, and cost-effectively, has the potential to raise living standards across the world in several important ways.

Economic Growth and Prosperity

By contributing to faster, more cost-effective innovation, AGI could drive significant economic growth. Key impacts include:

• High ROI on innovation: Research suggests social returns of at least $4 for every $1 spent on innovation, potentially rising to over $20 when accounting for broader factors
• Global prosperity: Potential to raise the global standard of living to levels considered respectable in modern developed countries
• Transformation scale: A tenfold increase in global GDP (comparable to the economic growth achieved between 1820-2010) would represent approximately $13,500 trillion in economic value when discounted at 5%

As a "technology of technologies," AGI could enhance innovation across all fields, potentially raising the global standard of living to levels considered respectable in modern developed countries—a transformation comparable to the global economic gains achieved between 1820 and 2010.

Education Improvements

AGI could address critical gaps in global education access and quality:

• Addressing critical needs: Currently, 57% of ten-year-olds in Low and Middle-Income Countries cannot read simple texts
• Personalized learning: Adaptive educational experiences tailored to individual learning styles and paces
• Proven improvements: Early studies show AI-enhanced learning significantly improves performance on tasks like SAT math problems
• Broader access: Making high-quality education available to people of all backgrounds globally

AGI could provide personalized, adaptive learning experiences, making high-quality education more accessible and effective for people of all backgrounds. This could be particularly impactful given the notable benefits of personalized tuition on learning outcomes. Early studies have shown that AI-enhanced learning can significantly improve performance on tasks like SAT math problems and computer programming.

Healthcare Advancements

AGI's potential to transform healthcare includes:

• Improved diagnostics: More accurate and earlier disease detection
• Personalized medicine: Treatment plans tailored to individual genetic profiles
• Accelerated research: Faster drug discovery and development processes
• Genetic insights: Better understanding of genetic variants in diseases like cystic fibrosis and cancer
• Equitable access: Improvements in healthcare quality for underserved populations

These advancements may occur directly through AI-assisted drug discovery, or indirectly through insights into genetics and disease mechanisms. For example, AI-predicted missense data enables researchers to learn more about the role of genetic variants in diseases such as cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, or cancer.

Deepening Human Knowledge and Accelerating Scientific Discovery

Recent breakthroughs have demonstrated the potential for AI models to capture complex scientific concepts and enable novel discoveries in domains such as mathematics, chemistry, and biology.

AGI as a Force Multiplier

By dramatically expanding our cognitive capacities, AGI could fundamentally alter the constraint landscape for research. In principle, it is possible to concurrently apply many replicas of AGI systems to solving important problems with major downstream impact, such as new discoveries in energy that could significantly affect energy prices and environmental health.

The Nobel Turing Challenge, for example, aims to develop a highly autonomous AI system that can perform top-level science, indistinguishable from the quality of that performed by the best human scientists, potentially achieving discoveries worthy of Nobel Prize level recognition.

Accelerating Research

AGI could accelerate scientific research through several mechanisms:

• Analyzing vast, complex datasets from multiple experiments and laboratories to uncover patterns beyond human perception
• Digesting and synthesizing entire fields of scientific literature to help researchers formulate better hypotheses
• Serving as executable repositories of domain knowledge, capturing intricate relationships among hundreds of thousands of variables
• Automating or semi-automating experimental design and execution through robotics

As a specific example, researchers have already leveraged deep learning and graph neural networks to discover 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials, effectively multiplying the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity.

Enhancing Information Processing and Lowering Barriers to Innovation

AGI could democratize enhanced information processing capability and access to knowledge at unprecedented scale, rendering it accessible to vast swathes of the world's population.

Democratizing Access

AGI could lower the barriers to innovation by making advanced problem-solving capabilities widely accessible. This could enable individuals and small organizations to tackle complex challenges previously only addressable by large, well-funded institutions.

Applications, APIs, tools, and agents will likely become more widely accessible over time, representing an important shift in how knowledge is distributed, accessed, understood, and leveraged. AI assistants in particular are expected to take on a number of roles to help augment and improve human decision-making.

New Problem-Solving Paradigms

AGI will help create new tools to better test and understand the world. An exciting emerging area is using multi-agent systems to study emergent social phenomena – complex behaviors arising spontaneously from the interaction of individual agents.

This opens up entirely new avenues for scientific inquiry, allowing researchers to explore the dynamics of social systems, markets, and institutions in ways that were previously impossible. For example, researchers could populate simulated worlds with AI agents to study how social norms evolve or how cooperation emerges.

Balancing Benefits and Risks

The pursuit of AGI is motivated by these important benefits—the ability to deploy intelligence at scale will allow society to devote new resources to many domains and problems crucial to the betterment of humankind. However, the benefits of AGI can only be fully realized if systems are developed safely and responsibly.

• Dual-use capabilities: Many of AGI's most beneficial capabilities (like scientific discovery or systems optimization) could also be misused. The misuse prevention approaches outlined in this framework aim to block harmful applications while enabling beneficial ones.
• Sustainable progress: By ensuring AGI systems remain aligned with human values and intentions, the alignment approaches in this framework help ensure that benefits accumulate over time rather than being undermined by unintended consequences.
• Maintaining human agency: The safety framework's emphasis on human oversight and control helps ensure that AGI enhances human capabilities and decision-making rather than diminishing human agency and control.
• Enabling broader deployment: Strong safety guarantees make it possible to deploy AGI more widely and in more domains, maximizing potential benefits while managing risks.

By developing robust safety measures alongside advancing capabilities, we can work toward a future where AGI enhances human flourishing without introducing unacceptable risks.