Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are not talking about current AI at all. They are talking about the future, which could be decades away. But it is very likely we will have superintelligent AI in our lifetimes. Here's a survey of AI experts: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf
>We thus designed a brief questionnaire
and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The
median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level
machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising
to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move
on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate
the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be
‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity
72 out of the 170 survey respondents were attendees of the conferences “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI 12) and “Impacts and Risks of Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI Impacts 2012). It's not surprising that AGI researchers believe that AGI will be developed soon.
I don't understand why participants of a conference on artificial general intelligence should be excluded from predictions about artificial general intelligence.
But whatever, even the "weak AI" researchers had similar opinions: The median predicted date for a 50% probability of AGI was 2050 by the top 100 AI researchers they surveyed. Only 10 years ahead of the more liberal predictions of the AGI group.
Well, a survey of AI researchers in the 60's would have said we'd have AGI by now. Surveying researchers in a field is not a reliable method for determining truth.
I'm not certain that's correct, only some people predicted AI within 50 years in the 60's.
Presumably modern researchers have a lot more information by now so their predictions are likely to be more accurate. As we get closer in time to it, it will become more predictable and obvious. You can't really have expected people at the time of the very first computers to have predicted the date of AI accurately.
Note the prediction has large error bars, with researchers predicting a 90% chance by the end of this century, but "only" a 50% chance within 25 years.
Anyway what's the alternative prediction? If you don't take predictions from the experts, who do you ask for predictions? Lay people? Just make stuff up? It's the best we can do.
Anyway what's the alternative prediction? If you don't take predictions from the experts, who do you ask for predictions? Lay people? Just make stuff up? It's the best we can do.
One way could be to come up with one or more plausible, step-by-step stories for how AGI will be developed, then model how long each step might take to happen. This would open things up to discussion and criticism instead of having to take the word of experts as gospel. It still wouldn't be scientific, but at least it'd be closer.
There are far too many unknowns to even attempt that. No one even agrees what methods will lead to AGI, let alone how long it will take to make the necessary breakthroughs in those fields. This subject is entirely within the realm of opinion.
I'm not arguing you should take the predictions as gospel. It's just an interesting and relevant datapoint. Maybe the only objective datapoint we have.
Because there is little overlap between AGI researchers and machine learning researchers (or even regular AI researchers, but there's a bit more overlap here). AGI is a mix of philosophy and traditional AI (logic, agents, planning, value functions, etc.). The survey would have much more credibility if it were conducted of researchers at a machine learning conference like NIPS or ICML. Or even a top AI conference like AAAI.
Let's just say that we would not be worrying about AGI if it weren't for the advances in machine learning, which has little to do with AGI research.
>We thus designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity