Predicting the future is hard, so it's no surprise that we occasionally miss important developments.

However, several times recently, in the contexts of Covid forecasting and AI progress, I noticed that I missed some crucial feature of a development I was interested in getting right, and it felt to me like I could’ve seen it coming if only I had tried a little harder. (Some others probably did better, but I could imagine that I wasn't the only one who got things wrong.)

Maybe this is hindsight bias, but if there's something to it, I want to distill the nature of the mistake.

First, here are the examples that prompted me to take notice:

Predicting the course of the Covid pandemic:

I didn’t foresee the contribution from sociological factors (e.g., “people not wanting to get hospitalized” – Zvi called it “the control system”).
- As a result, I overpredicted [...]

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First published:
May 9th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLwo67p7zBuPsjG5t/we-might-be-missing-some-key-feature-of-ai-takeoff-it-ll

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“We might be missing some key feature of AI takeoff; it’ll probably seem like ‘we could’ve seen this coming’” by Lukas_Gloor

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“We might be missing some key feature of AI takeoff; it’ll probably seem like ‘we could’ve seen this coming’” by Lukas_Gloor