Experts' Predictions about the Future of AI

Key Takeaways

hi there's a lot of disagreement about the future of AI but there's also a lot of disagreement about what the experts think about the future of AI I sometimes hear people saying that all of this concern about AI risk just comes from watching too much sci-fi and the actual AI researchers aren't worried about it at all when it comes to timelines some people will claim that the experts agree that AGI is hundreds of years away prediction as they say is very difficult especially about the future and that's because we don't have data about it yet but expert opinion about the future exists in the present so we can do science on it we can survey the experts we can find the expert consensus and that's what this paper is trying to do it's called when will a I exceed human performance evidence from AI experts so these researchers from the future of humanity Institute at the University of Oxford the AI impact project and Yale University ran a survey they asked every researcher who published in ICML or nips in 2015 those two are pretty much the most prestigious AI conferences right now so this survey got 352 of the top AI researchers and asked them all sorts of questions about the future of AI and the experts all agreed that they did not agree with each other and Robert Aumann didn't even agree with that there was a lot of variation in people's predictions but that's to be expected and the paper uses statistical methods to aggregate these opinions into something we can use for example here's the graph showing when the respondents think will achieve high level machine intelligence which is defined as when unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers so that's roughly equivalent to what I mean when I say super intelligence you can see these gray lines show how the graph would look with different randomly chosen subsets of the forecasts and there's a lot of variation there but the aggregate forecast in red shows that overall the experts think we'll pass 50% chance of achieving high level machine intelligence about 45 years from now well that's from 2016 so more like 43 years from now and they give a 10% chance of it happening within nine years which is seven years now so it's probably not too soon to be concerned about it a quick side point about surveys by the way in a 2010 poll 44% of Americans said that they supported homosexuals serving openly in the military in the same poll 58% of respondents said they supported gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military implicitly fourteen percent of respondents supported gay men and lesbians but did not support homosexuals something similar seems to be going on in this survey because when the researchers were asked when they thought all occupations would be fully automated all defined as for any occupation machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers they gave their 50% estimate at a hundred and twenty two years compared to forty five for high-level machine intelligence these are very similar questions from this we can conclude that Aix PERTs are really uncertain about this and precise wording in surveys can have a surprisingly big effect on the results figure two in the paper shows the median estimates for lots of different a AI milestones this is really interesting because it gives a nice overview of how difficult a AI researchers expect these different things to be for example human level Starcraft play seems like it will take about as long as human level laundry folding also interesting here is the game of go remember this is before alphago the AI experts expected go to take about 12 years and that's why alphago was such a big deal it was about eleven years ahead of people's expectations but what milestone is at the top what tasks do the AI researchers think will take the longest to achieve longer even than high-level machine intelligence that's able to do all human tasks that's right it's AI research anyway on to questions of safety and risk this section is for those who think that people like me should stop making a fuss about AI safety because the AI experts all agree that it's not a problem first of all the AI experts don't all agree about anything but let's look at the questions this one asks about the expected outcome of high-level machine intelligence the researchers are fairly optimistic overall giving on average a 25% chance for a good outcome and a 20% chance for an extremely good outcome but they nonetheless gave a 10% chance for a bad outcome and 5% for an outcome described as extremely bad for example human extinction 5% chance of human extinction level badness is a cause for concern moving on this question asks the experts to read Stewart Russell's argument for why highly advanced AI might pose a risk this is very close related to the arguments I've been making on YouTube it says the primary concern with highly advanced AI is not spooky emergent consciousness but simply the ability to make high quality decisions here quality refers to the expected outcome utility of actions taken now we have a problem one the utility function may not be perfectly aligned with the values of the human race which are at best very difficult to pin down to any sufficiently capable intelligent system will prefer to ensure its own continued existence and to acquire physical and computational resources not for their own sake but to succeed in its assigned tasks a system that is optimizing a function of n variables where the objective depends on a subset of size K less than n will often set the remaining unconstrained variables to extreme values if one of those unconstrained values is actually something we care about the solution may be highly undesirable this is essentially the old story of the genie in the lamp or The Sorcerer's Apprentice or King Midas you get exactly what you asked for not what you want so do the AI experts agree with that well 11% of them think no it's not a real problem 19 percent think no it's not an important problem but the remainder 70% of the AI experts agree that this is at least a moderately important problem and how much do the AI experts think that society should prioritize AI safety research well 48% of them think we should prioritize it more than we currently are and only 11% think we should prioritize it less so there we are AI experts are very unclear about what the future holds but they think the catastrophic risks are possible and that this is an important problem so we need to do more AI safety research I want to end the video by saying thank you so much to my excellent patreon supporters these people and in this video I'm especially thanking Jason hice who's been a patron for a while now we've had some quite interesting discussions over a patreon chat been fun so thank you Jason and thank you all for watching I'll see you next [Music]