Five Hinge‑Questions That Decide Whether AGI Is Five Years Away or Twenty
Published on May 6, 2025 2:48 AM GMTFor people who care about falsifiable stakes rather than vibesTL;DRAll timeline arguments ultimately turn on five quantitative pivots. Pick optimistic answers to three of them and your median forecast collapses into the 2026–2029 range; pick pessimistic answers to any two and you drift past 2040. The pivots (I think) are:Which empirical curve matters (hardware spend, algorithmic efficiency, or revenue)Whether software‑only recursive self‑improvement (RSI) can accelerate capabilities faster than hardware can be installed.How sharply compute translates into economic value once broad “agentic” reliability is reached.Whether automating half of essential tasks ignites runaway growth or whether Baumol’s law keeps aggregate productivity anchored until all bottlenecks fallHow much alignment fear, regulation, and supply‑chain friction slow scale‑upThe rest of this post traces how the canonical short‑timeline narrative 
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45oxYwysFiqwfKCcN/untitled-draft-keg3
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