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Module 4 / Lesson 10.5

Thousands of Authors on Future of AI

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Thousands of Authors on Future of AI

Learning: Please read the summary of the survey here. Pay close attention to the graphs on milestone forecasts.

Reflection: As you read, focus on 

  • How the estimates vary widely across researchers. Why might different experts predict such different timelines for the same milestone? Jot down one reason.

Context: Katja Grace is AI reseracher and is co-founder of AI impacts. In one of her paper, she with her colleagues conducted a survey of its kind, 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues gave predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems. The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model. If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. The latter estimate is 13 years earlier than that reached in a similar survey we conducted only one year earlier [Grace et al., 2022]. However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey).

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