Do you think AI experts deserve their notoriety at predicting? The several public predictions that I know of prior to 1980 were indeed early (i.e. we have passed the time they predicted) but [Michie’s survey] covers about ten times as many people and suggests that in the 70s, most CS researchers thought human-level AI would not arrive by 2014.
I thought that the main result by Armstrong and Sotala was that most AI experts who made a public prediction, predicted human-level AI within 15 to 20 years in their future, regardless on when they made the prediction.
Is this new data? Can you have some reference on how it was obtained?
That was one main result, yes. It looks like Armstrong and Sotala counted the Michie survey as one ‘prediction’ (see their dataset here). They have only a small number of other early predictions, so it is easy for that to make a big difference.
The image I linked is the dataset they used, with some modifications made by Paul Christiano and I (explained at more length here along with the new dataset for download). e.g. we took out duplications, and some things which seemed to have been sampled in a biased fashion (such that only early predictions would be recorded). We took out the Michie set altogether—our graph is now of public statements, not survey data.
Do you think AI experts deserve their notoriety at predicting? The several public predictions that I know of prior to 1980 were indeed early (i.e. we have passed the time they predicted) but [Michie’s survey] covers about ten times as many people and suggests that in the 70s, most CS researchers thought human-level AI would not arrive by 2014.
I thought that the main result by Armstrong and Sotala was that most AI experts who made a public prediction, predicted human-level AI within 15 to 20 years in their future, regardless on when they made the prediction.
Is this new data? Can you have some reference on how it was obtained?
That was one main result, yes. It looks like Armstrong and Sotala counted the Michie survey as one ‘prediction’ (see their dataset here). They have only a small number of other early predictions, so it is easy for that to make a big difference.
The image I linked is the dataset they used, with some modifications made by Paul Christiano and I (explained at more length here along with the new dataset for download). e.g. we took out duplications, and some things which seemed to have been sampled in a biased fashion (such that only early predictions would be recorded). We took out the Michie set altogether—our graph is now of public statements, not survey data.