The speaker finds societal outcomes difficult to forecast because society is inherently chaotic, whereas technical superintelligence progress can be extrapolated from benchmarks.

“but we discuss all of these very technical questions about the nature of superintelligence, and we barely even begin to speculate about what happens in society just because with superintelligence you can at least draw a line through the benchmarks and try to extrapolate, and here not only is society inherently chaotic, but there are so many things that we could be leaving out if we can enhance that.”