The terms 'human-level artificial intelligence' and 'artificial general intelligence' are widely used to refer to the possibility of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) with potentially extreme impacts on society. These terms are poorly defined and do not necessarily indicate what is most important with respect to future societal impacts. We suggest that the term 'transformative AI' is a helpful alternative, reflecting the possibility that advanced AI systems could have very large impacts on society without reaching human-level cognitive abilities. To be most useful, however, more analysis of what it means for AI to be 'transformative' is needed. In this paper, we propose three different levels on which AI might be said to be transformative, associated with different levels of societal change. We suggest that these distinctions would improve conversations between policy makers and decision makers concerning the mid- to long-term impacts of advances in AI. Further, we feel this would have a positive effect on strategic foresight efforts involving advanced AI, which we expect to illuminate paths to alternative futures. We conclude with a discussion of the benefits of our new framework and by highlighting directions for future work in this area.

翻译：“人类层面人工智能”和“人工一般智能”这两个术语被广泛用来指高级人工智能(AI)对社会具有潜在极端影响的可能性。这些术语定义不清,不一定表明未来社会影响的最重要之处。我们建议,“转变性AI”一词是一种有益的替代办法,反映了先进的AI系统在不达到人类层面认知能力的情况下可能对社会产生巨大影响的可能性。然而,最有用的是,需要更多地分析AI意味着什么是“转变性”。在本文件中,我们提出了可以认为AI具有变革性的三个不同层次,与社会变化的不同程度相关联。我们建议,这些区别将改善决策者和决策者之间关于AI进展的中长期影响的对话。此外,我们认为,这将对涉及先进的AI的战略展望工作产生积极影响,我们期望通过这些方式来说明替代未来的道路。我们最后将讨论我们的新框架的好处,并突出这一领域未来工作的方向。