Writing AI Revolution

How and Why?

It’s a rare circumstance that reading an article flips the way you see the future inside out. This happened to me with Tim Urban’s monumental essay from Wait But Why blog: AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence / AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction. Urban created a fantastic, comprehensively researched overview on the topic. After reading it and delving more and more into the subject, it became clear to me that this is one of the most important transformations in our history and that these processes will completely reshape our world. Urban’s essay is not short — 23,532 words (or 1h32m read). Given the importance of the subject, I worked on creating a version that holds all the most important ideas, while radically cutting the length. I aimed to distill the essay to the form that is maximally compact, impactful and easy to understand.

Changes

• New Images. (despite my ❤ for Wait But Why style)
• ~3x shorter. 1h32min read → 35min read, 23k words → 8.6k words.
• Simpler. I reconsidered every sentence aiming to maximally lower the cognitive load for the reader.
• Altered. I tweaked some of the examples, added a couple of new perspectives and metaphors in cases I felt the problem could be described simpler or more impactfully.
• Simplified English (so text can be fully understood by not only fully proficient in English)