As one who has made arguments that sound similar to, but are importantly different from, the ones you criticize, I will clarify:<p>1. I don&#x27;t claim <i>everything</i> always stays on a smooth exponential trend, but that things do so <i>on a large scale</i> as small variations average out. It doesn&#x27;t surprise me that someone managed to get above-trend performance at Go. However, I predict this will not lead to above-trend GDP.<p>2. I don&#x27;t predict we will get human-level AI in 2050. I predict we will probably <i>never</i> reach a tech level that would make human-level AI a possibility. The more people start fretting about the &#x27;AI alignment problem&#x27; (which we would in any case no more be able to solve today than Leonardo da Vinci could design a fail-safe nuclear reactor), the lower the probability that we ever reach that tech level. Conversely, though a small thing, this news of continued incremental progress makes me a tiny fraction of a percent more optimistic.