AI timeline predictions: are we getting better?

54 Stuart_Armstrong 17 August 2012 07:07AM

EDIT: Thanks to Kaj's work, we now have more rigorous evidence on the "Maes-Garreau law" (the idea that people will predict AI coming before they die). This post has been updated with extra information. The original data used for this analysis can now be found through here.

Thanks to some sterling work by Kaj Sotala and others (such as Jonathan Wang and Brian Potter - all paid for by the gracious Singularity Institute, a fine organisation that I recommend everyone look into), we've managed to put together a databases listing all AI predictions that we could find. The list is necessarily incomplete, but we found as much as we could, and collated the data so that we could have an overview of what people have been predicting in the field since Turing.

We retained 257 predictions total, of various quality (in our expanded definition, philosophical arguments such as "computers can't think because they don't have bodies" count as predictions). Of these, 95 could be construed as giving timelines for the creation of human-level AIs. And "construed" is the operative word - very few were in a convenient "By golly, I give a 50% chance that we will have human-level AIs by XXXX" format. Some gave ranges; some were surveys of various experts; some predicted other things (such as child-like AIs, or superintelligent AIs).

Where possible, I collapsed these down to single median estimate, making some somewhat arbitrary choices and judgement calls. When a range was given, I took the mid-point of that range. If a year was given with a 50% likelihood estimate, I took that year. If it was the collection of a variety of expert opinions, I took the prediction of the median expert. If the author predicted some sort of AI by a given date (partial AI or superintelligent AI), I took that date as their estimate rather than trying to correct it in one direction or the other (there were roughly the same number of subhuman AIs as suphuman AIs in the list, and not that many of either). I read extracts of the papers to make judgement calls when interpreting problematic statements like "within thirty years" or "during this century" (is that a range or an end-date?).

So some biases will certainly have crept in during the process. That said, it's still probably the best data we have. So keeping all that in mind, let's have a look at what these guys said (and it was mainly guys).

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