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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."
Let's hope they're animal lovers.
Nope, 20 years from now. Along with fusion and holographic storage.
Of course, if humanity manages to create real AI AND fusion AND holographic storage more or less contemporaneously (since everything is 20 years away) we're screwed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who is AL? ;-O
Oh come on. I don't even have a computer that can pick up stuff in my room and organize it without prior input, and nobody does, and that would not be close to a general AI when it happens.
They're really assuming that the technology will go from zero to sixty in 20 years. Which they assumed 20 years ago, too, and it didn't happen. Meanwhile, nobody has any significant understanding of what consciousness is. Now, it might be that a true AI computer doesn't need to be conscious, but we still don't know enough about it to fake it. We also have no system that can on demand form its own symbolic system to deal with a rich and arbitrary set of inputs similar to those conveyed by the human senses.
Compare this to things that actually have been achieved: We had the mathematical theory of computation at least 100 years before there was a mechanical or electronic system that would practically execute it (Babbage didn't get his system built). We had the physical theory for space travel that far back, too.
We know very little about how a mind works, except that it keeps turning out to be more complicated than we expected.
So, I'm really very dubious.
Bruce Perens.
The problem is, this isn't a survey of "AI experts," it's a survey of participants in the Artificial General Intelligence conference. As far as I can see, this is a conference populated by the few remaining holdouts who believe that creating human-like, or human-equivalent, AIs, is a tractable or interesting problem; most AI research now is oriented towards much more specific aspects of intelligence. So this is a poll of a subset of AI researchers who have self-selected along the lines that they think human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future; it's hardly surprising, then, that the results show that many of them do in fact believe human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future.
I would be much more interested in a wider poll of AI researchers; I highly doubt anything like as many would predict nobel-prize-winning AIs in 10-20 years, or even ever. TFA itself reports a survey of AI researchers in 2006, in which 41% said they thought human-equivalent AI would never be produces, and another 41% said they thought it would take 50 years to produce such a thing.
The most likely scenario is, AI which develops fusion and holographic storage.
Yeah, but if we just add enough IF statements...
Deleted
This kind of thinking is one of the major things standing in the way of AGI. The complex behaviors of the human mind are what leads to intelligence, they do not detract from it. Our ability to uncover the previously unknown workings of a system comes from our ability to abstract aspects of unrelated experiences and apply/attempt to apply them to the new situation. This can not be achieved by a single-minded number crunching machine, but instead evolves out of an adaptable human being as he goes about his daily life.
Sexual attraction, and other emotional desires, are what drive humans beings to make scientific advancements, build bridges, grow food. How could that be a hindrance to the process? It drives the process.
Finally, the assertion that an AGI would need to mask it's amazing intellect to pass as human is silly. When was the last time you read a particularly insightful comment and concluded that it was written by a computer? When did you notice that the spelling and punctuation in a comment was too perfect? People see that and they don't think anything of it.
What's with all the pessimism? Strong AI is a matter of inevitability. If nothing else, simulations of the human brain accurate down to the individual neuron could easily achieve this, even if it requires substantially more powerful computers than we have now. This would be the brute force method, and I don't doubt that eventually our understanding of cognition and intelligence will advance to the point where we will be able to build thinking computers.
Will it happen any time soon? Absolutely not. But I think it's a little short sighted to say that we'll NEVER develop such technology.
will fly by their own accord to their destination!
Well, they were close, but it was Toyotas, not Hondas that had the brake problems.
Monstar L
... or not crash all the F*(king time.
As I've been saying about upcoming predictions about AI for as long as known anything about computers:
"When computers can reliably manage their own device drivers, I'll start taking future predictions about AI seriously."
I'm still waiting.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Your opinion is dumb.
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.