AI researchers predict when AI will beat humans

According to a survey of more than 350 artificial intelligence researchers there is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years.

AI will master many activities a lot sooner, though. Machines are predicted to be better than us at 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 surgery by 2053. In fact, all human jobs will be automated within the next 120 years, say respondents.

Arxiv – When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts

Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. These results will inform discussion amongst researchers and policymakers about anticipating and managing trends in AI.

Aggregate subjective probability of ‘high-level machine intelligence’ arrival by future years. Each respondent provided three data points for their forecast and these were fit to the Gamma CDF by least squares to produce the grey CDFs. The “Aggregate Forecast” is the mean distribution over all individual CDFs (also called the “mixture” distribution). The confidence interval was generated by bootstrapping (clustering on respondents) and plotting the 95% interval for estimated probabilities at each year. The LOESS curve is a non-parametric regression on all data points.