Gigaom AI Minute – October 14

Transcript

There's a vigorous debate about when we might get an artificial general intelligence. Here are a few predictions:

Mark Zuckerberg had this to say, "So the basic human senses like seeing, hearing, language, core things that we do. I think it's possible to get to the point in the next five to ten years where we have computer systems that are better than people at each of those things."

Ray Kurzweil has said for some time that he predicts that computers will be as smart as humans by 2029. By 2045, he believes that they will be billions of times smarter than us. He makes these predictions based on Moore's Law, and he calls that time the "Singularity" and suggests that it is hard for present-day humans to imagine life after.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, says he used to doubt Kurzweil’s prediction, but now sees it coming true. He adds, "Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people."

Bill Hibbard, author of the book "Super-Intelligent Machines" weighs in with, "Even if my most pessimistic guess is true, it means it's going to happen during the lifetime of people who are already born."

Bill Gates sees the future unfolding as follows, "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern."

In 2015, the aforementioned Hawking said, "Computers will overtake humans with AI at some [point] within the next 100 years."

And finally, Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android, says that the combination of AI with quantum computers and their ability to pattern match means that, "in hundreds of years might get us to the point of this conundrum, who is the master and who is the servant and all that."