AI Impacts

Accuracy of AI Predictions

Updated 4 June 2015 It is unclear how informative we should expect expert predictions about AI timelines to be. Individual predictions are undoubtedly often off by many decades, since they disagree with each other. However their aggregate may still be quite informative. The

Publication biases toward shorter predictions

We expect predictions that human-level AI will come sooner to be recorded publicly more often, for a few reasons. Public statements are probably more optimistic than surveys because of such effects. The difference appears to be less than

Selection bias from optimistic experts

Experts on AI probably systematically underestimate time to human-level AI, due to a selection bias. The same is more strongly true of AGI experts. The scale of such biases appears to be decades. Most public AI predictions

Why do AGI researchers expect AI so soon?

By Katja Grace, 24 May 2015 People have been predicting when human-level AI will appear for many decades. A few years ago, MIRI made a big, organized collection of such predictions, along with helpful metadata. We are grateful, and just put up a page

Group Differences in AI Predictions

Updated 9 November 2020 In 2015 AGI researchers appeared to expect human-level AI substantially sooner than other AI researchers. The difference ranges from about five years to at least about sixty years as we move

Supporting AI Impacts

By Katja Grace, 21 May 2015 We now have a donations page. If you like what we are doing as much as anything else you can think of to spend marginal dollars on, I encourage you to support this project! Money will go to more

The Maes-Garreau Law

The Maes-Garreau law posits that people tend to predict exciting future technologies toward the end of their lifetimes. It probably does not hold for predictions of human-level AI. Contents ClarificationEvidenceImplications Clarification From Wikipedia: The Maes–Garreau law is the statement that

AI Impacts

All pages and blog posts