Experts do not agree on how long it will take machines to achieve human level intelligence. The title of the article in which you can find the forecasts above is enlightening: Human-Level AI Is Right Around the Corner—or Hundreds of Years Away. (I adore it.)
And the best is Rodney Brooks’ strong view on Kurzweil’s optimism:
When will we have computers/robots recognizably as intelligent and as conscious as humans? Not in our lifetimes, not even in Ray Kurzweil’s lifetime, and despite his fervent wishes, just like the rest of us, he will die within just a few decades. It will be well over 100 years before we see this level in our machines. Maybe many hundred years.
I am sorry about Kurzweil, but I am with Brooks. There is a lot of exponential foolishness going around.
A broader survey of 352 researchers who published at the 2015 NIPS and ICML conferences predicts that there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years(1):
Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053). Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans.
Do you think AI experts have any ability to foresee AI progress? Maybe, it all depends on what we mean by artificial intelligence…
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(1) Grace, Katja, John Salvatier, Allan Dafoe, Baobao Zhang, and Owain Evans. 2017. ‘When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts’, May. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08807.
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