When Will Artificial Intelligence Surpass Humans?

Pack you bags, say your goodbyes, and get ready to welcome your robot overlords.

Just kidding, we’re not even close to that.

Robots have a loooong way to go

But it is interesting to ask people who actually know about AI, when will it develop enough to beat humans. But beat at what? Manufacturing? Writing poems? There are very different skills involved in those.

To answer this question, researchers from the FHI asked 352 AI experts to estimate when will AI develop enough to beat humans at a variety of activities. Here we summarise their findings for 32 different areas.

Timeline of when will AI surpass humans for 32 activities.

AI will outperform us in very specific tasks, such as playing video-games or answering factual questions. This is not scary or particularly useful (would not mind the laundry folding robot, though). The really smart activities, like doing mathematical research or writing a bestseller, are still decades away.

We can’t yet expect AI to be independent and generally intelligent across many tasks. So why is artificial intelligence not better at a variety of tasks?

The answer is in how we engineer AI to perform well on a task. We train the algorithm many times on just that task, until the machine masters the activity. That can mean hundreds, if not thousands of training sessions. Even small changes from the training conditions can make the algorithms fail miserably. For example, placing a psychedelic sticker next to an object confuses image-recognition software to believe it is seeing toasters instead of bananas. Toasters instead of bananas.

Algorithm misclassifies banana as toaster due to psychedelic sticker.

Can we trust these predictions?

Like any other predictions they are just predictions. We still trust them more than a general guess, because experts from the field made them.

But experts can get it wrong, too. And it is not just experts who are bad at predicting the future. Humans in general have a tendency to predict the future incorrectly. Let’s not forget what our ancestors in the 19th century thought the future year 2000 will look like:

Damn you drones, taking away jobs from our flying rural postmen.

What’s next?

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