Will AI outperform humans in the next 10 years?

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AI will outperform humans in truck driving by 2027, research suggests. Source: MichaelGaida on Pixabay

Researcher Katja Grace together with collaborators from Oxford and Yale published results from a survey conducted among experts from industry and academia:

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.

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Of course, the limitations of this is that it is a best efforts prediction by expert practitioners. As the case of solar energy predictions shows, insiders are among the most conservative in their own field.

Google DeepMind has bested human players this year. It did so using a tensor processing unit, which uses one tenth of the power as the GPU set up last year. So undeniably progress is fast.

AlphaGo also paired up with human Go players in an interesting example of intelligence augmentation.

In the meantime, U.S. Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin walks back on his statement that AI won’t be on the radar for 50–100 more years, explaining that he was referring to “R2D2” kind of robots.

So the question is, how fast will AI progress really be? And… Is R2D2 really 100 years away? 🤔

If you’re even slightly interested in these questions, follow my weekly newsletter Exponential View.

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