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When Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence?
destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings ... can be done by computers for pennies an hour,' adding that AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity ... and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."
I assume you mean that's "one idea behind AI"?
Most AI researchers do not have such grand goals. Everything from spellcheckers to hand writing recognition, to Google's search algorithms are the result of AI.
Certainly not everyone is trying or even wants to produce strong AI, the goal behind AI in general is simply to produce less dumb systems.
AI is a very misunderstood subject, and articles like this really don't help. Asking the question when AI will surpass human intelligence sounds like it's coming from someone who just hasn't learnt a thing about AI and it's history. AI is seen by many as a failure precisely because a fringe few keep pursuing this idea that we're just 5 to 10 years away from robots which we can't tell apart from humans when that's really an absurd goal when we're so far away from having computers capable of that level of processing, assuming we even know what computer architecture is required for such a level of intelligence. These predictions hurt the field so much and give it such a bad reputation as they consistently end up being false and yet, if it weren't for AI from real researchers who have more reasonable goals right now, we wouldn't have any of the search and data mining algorithms we have today, we wouldn't have handwriting recognition, voice recognition, we wouldn't have half as efficient networking protocols and so on.
The fruits of AI research are everywhere, it's silly to suggest AI only has such a narrow focus on a target that, with current knowledge, is so far from being possible we can't even begin to predict when it'll be possible. We may have a breakthrough tommorrow that allows it to happen within 6 months, or we may have no breakthrough at all and have to wait 50 years for high end, flexible quantum computers or biological computers to be capable of it and for us to have to figured out the required algorithms to run on them. This is why the question in the title is a really stupid one to ask- because simply put, no one can possibly even give a reasonable estimate, they can at best make a guess which may or may not end up being right.
So for many AI researchers that actually produce meaningful research, the goal is still better data mining algorithms, better algorithms for solving or finding acceptable approximations for COPs and so forth. Even when we do finally have the hardware and knowledge to produce intelligent systems your assertion that it'll be about improving itself in all dimensions will likely prove false, we might want a system that can tell us the solution to a moral dilemma, but if that moral dilemma is about someone blackmailing us, we likely wont want the system to be able to figure out how to walk and fire a gun, and then go and shoot the person doing the blackmailing, there will still be restrictions on how far you want it to go.
I do agree that your suggestion is one goal though certainly, it's just not the only goal, and nor is it necessarily the primary goal. I suspect though, that when robotics are good enough to outdo humans, rather than creating new intelligent robots, we'll be more interested in storing the human mind, in a possibly augmented and improved form on these robots so that said humans can live indefinitely in these robot bodies, only requiring replacement parts or upgrades once every few decades. Effectively controlling artificial beings, with real, natural, human intelligence.