Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Exceed Human Performance

Trucking will be computerized long before surgery, computer scientists say.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
May 31, 2017

Artificial intelligence is changing the world and doing it at breakneck speed. The promise is that intelligent machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far.

And that raises an interesting question: when will artificial intelligence exceed human performance? More specifically, when will a machine do your job better than you?

Today, we have an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Katja Grace at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and a few pals. To find out, these guys asked the experts. They surveyed the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence by asking them when they think intelligent machines will better humans in a wide range of tasks. And many of the answers are something of a surprise.

The experts that Grace and co coopted were academics and industry experts who gave papers at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July 2015 and the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in December 2015. These are two of the most important events for experts in artificial intelligence, so it’s a good bet that many of the world’s experts were on this list.

Grace and co asked them all—1,634 of them—to fill in a survey about when artificial intelligence would be better and cheaper than humans at a variety of tasks. Of these experts, 352 responded. Grave and co then calculated their median responses

The experts predict that AI will outperform humans in the next 10 years in tasks such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high school essays (by 2026), and driving trucks (by 2027).

But many other tasks will take much longer for machines to master. AI won’t be better than humans at working in retail until 2031, able to write a bestselling book until 2049, or capable of working as a surgeon until 2053.

The experts are far from infallible. They predicted that AI would be better than humans at Go by about 2027. (This was in 2015, remember.) In fact, Google’s DeepMind subsidiary has already developed an artificial intelligence capable of beating the best humans. That took two years rather than 12. It’s easy to think that this gives the lie to these predictions.

The experts go on to predict a 50 percent chance that AI will be better than humans at more or less everything in about 45 years.

That’s the kind of prediction that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. The 40-year prediction horizon should always raise alarm bells. According to some energy experts, cost-effective fusion energy is about 40 years away—but it always has been. It was 40 years away when researchers first explored fusion more than 50 years ago. But it has stayed a distant dream because the challenges have turned out to be more significant than anyone imagined.

Forty years is an important number when humans make predictions because it is the length of most people’s working lives. So any predicted change that is further away than that means the change will happen beyond the working lifetime of everyone who is working today. In other words, it cannot happen with any technology that today’s experts have any practical experience with. That suggests it is a number to be treated with caution.

But teasing apart the numbers shows something interesting. This 45-year prediction is the median figure from all the experts. Perhaps some subset of this group is more expert than the others?

To find out if different groups made different predictions, Grace and co looked at how the predictions changed with the age of the researchers, the number of their citations (i.e., their expertise), and their region of origin.

It turns out that age and expertise make no difference to the prediction, but origin does. While North American researchers expect AI to outperform humans at everything in 74 years, researchers from Asia expect it in just 30 years.

That’s a big difference that is hard to explain. And it raises an interesting question: what do Asian researchers know that North Americans don’t (or vice versa)?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1705.08807 : When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts

El mundo 2045 del Pentágono

30 octubre, 2016 Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico Comments off

The world in 2045, according to Pentagon researchers

El mundo 2045 de acuerdo al Pentágono (VER VIDEO)

The world will be a very different place in 2045.

Predicting the future is fraught with challenges, but when it comes to technological advances and forward thinking, experts working at the Pentagon’s research agency may be the best people to ask.

Launched in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind some of the biggest innovations in the military — many of which have crossed over to the civilian technology market. These include things like advanced robotics, global-positioning systems, and the internet.

So what’s going to happen in 2045?

It’s pretty likely that robots and artificial technology will transform a bunch of industries, drone aircraft will continue their leap from the military to the civilian market, and self-driving cars will make your commute a lot more bearable.

But Darpa scientists have even bigger ideas. In a video series shot last yearcalled «Forward to the Future,» three researchers predicted what they imagined would be a reality in 30 years.

Dr. Justin Sanchez, a neuroscientist and director of Darpa’s Biological Technologies Office, believes we’ll be at a point where we can control things simply by using our mind.

«Imagine a world where you could just use your thoughts to control your environment,» Sanchez said. «Think about controlling different aspects of your home just using your brain signals, or maybe communicating with your friends and your family just using neural activity from your brain.»

According to Sanchez, Darpa is working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. There are already some examples of these kinds of futuristic breakthroughs in action, like brain implants controlling prosthetic arms.

Just last week Darpa demonstrated this amazing tech for the first time and gave a paralyzed man back the sense of touch — with brain implants that provided the feeling «as if his own hand were being touched,» he reported.

The future has more than just brain implants. Many other exciting things could change the buildings and other objects around us, says Stefanie Tompkins, a geologist and director of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office.

She thinks we’ll be able to build things that are incredibly strong but also very lightweight. Think of a skyscraper using materials that are strong as steel but light as carbon fiber. That’s a simple explanation for what Tompkins envisions, which gets a little bit more complicated down at the molecular level.

Here’s how she explains it: «In 30 years, I imagine a world where we don’t even recognize the materials that surround us.» (See her full explanation in the video below.)

«I think in 2045 we’re going to find that we have a very different relationship with the machines around us,» says Pam Melroy, an aerospace engineer and a former astronaut who is now a deputy director at Darpa’s Tactical Technologies Office. «I think that we will begin to see a time when we’re able to simply just talk or even press a button» to interact with a machine to get things done more intelligently, instead of using keyboards or rudimentary voice-recognition systems.

She continued: «For example, right now to prepare for landing in an aircraft there’s multiple steps that have to be taken to prepare yourself, from navigation, get out of the cruise mode, begin to set up the throttles … put the gear down. All of these steps have to happen in the right sequence.»

Instead, Melroy envisions an aircraft landing in the future being as simple as what an airline pilot tells the flight attendants: «Prepare for landing.» In 2045, a pilot may just say those three words and the computer knows the series of complex steps it needs to do to make that happen.

Or perhaps, with artificial intelligence, a pilot won’t even be necessary.

«Our world will be full of those kinds of examples where we can communicate directly our intent and have very complex outcomes by working together,» she said.