As part of the conversations recorded in this book, I asked each participant to give me his or her best guess for a date when there would be at least a 50 percent probability that artificial general intelligence (or human-level AI) will have been achieved. The results of this very informal survey are shown below.
A number of the individuals I spoke with were reluctant to attempt a guess at a specific year. Many pointed out that the path to AGI is highly uncertain and that there are an unknown number of hurdles that will need to be surmounted. Despite my best persuasive efforts, five people declined to give a guess. Most of the remaining 18 preferred that their individual guess remain anonymous.
As I noted in the introduction, the guesses are neatly bracketed by two people willing to provide dates on the record: Ray Kurzweil at 2029 and Rodney Brooks at 2200.
Here are the 18 guesses:
2029 11 years from 2018
2036 18 years
2038 20 years
2040 22 years
2068 (3) 50 years
2080 62 years
2088 70 years
2098 (2) 80 years
2118 (3) 100 years
2168 (2) 150 years
2188 170 years
2200 182 years
Mean: 2099, 81 years from 2018
Nearly everyone I spoke to had quite a lot to say about the path to AGI, and many people—including those who declined to give specific guesses—also gave intervals for when it might be achieved, so the individual interviews offer a lot more insight into this fascinating topic.
It is worth noting that the average date of 2099 is quite pessimistic compared with other surveys that have been done. The AI Impacts website (https://aiimpacts.org/ai-timeline-surveys/) shows results for a number of other surveys.
Most other surveys have generated results that cluster in the 2040 to 2050 range for human-level AI with a 50 percent probability. It’s important to note that most of these surveys included many more participants and may, in some cases, have included people outside the field of AI research.
For what it’s worth, the much smaller, but also very elite, group of people I spoke with does include several optimists, but taken as a whole, they see AGI as something that remains at least 50 years away, and perhaps 100 or more. If you want to see a true thinking machine, eat your vegetables.