Predictions of Human-Level AI Timelines

Guide to pages on AI timeline predictions

This page is an informal outline of the other pages on this site about AI timeline predictions made by others. Headings link to higher level pages, intended to summarize the evidence from pages below them. This list was complete on 7 April 2017 (here is

2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI

Published June 2016; last substantial update before Oct 2017 The 2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI is a survey of machine learning researchers that Katja Grace and John Salvatier of AI Impacts ran in

Concrete AI tasks for forecasting

This page contains a list of relatively well specified AI tasks designed for forecasting. Currently all entries were used in the 2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI. List Translate a text written in a newly discovered language

Note: This page is out of date. See an up-to-date version of this page on our wiki. Updated 5 June 2015 We know of around 1,300 public predictions of when human-level AI will arrive, of

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

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

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. Clarification From Wikipedia: The Maes–Garreau law is the statement that “most favorable

AI Timeline predictions in surveys and statements

Surveys seem to produce median estimates of time to human-level AI which are roughly a decade later than those produced from voluntary public statements. Details We compared several surveys to predictions made by similar groups of