Adding to what Paul said: jacob_cannell points to this comment which claims that in Mind Children Moravec predicted human-level AGI in 2028.
Moravec, “Mind Children”, page 68: “Human equivalence in 40 years”. There he is actually talking about human-level intelligent machines arriving by 2028 - not just the hardware you would theoretically require to build one if you had the ten million dollars to spend on it.
I just went and skimmed Mind Children. He’s predicting human-equivalent computational power on a personal computer in 40 years. He seems to say that humans will within 50 years be surpassed in every important way by machines (page 70, below), but I haven’t found a more precise or short-term statement yet.
The robot who will work alongside us in half a century will have some interesting properties. Its reasoning abilities should be astonishingly better than a human’s—even today’s puny systems are much better in some areas. But its perceptual and motor abilities will probably be comparable to ours. Most interestingly, this artificial person will be highly changeable, both as an individual and from one of its generations to the next. But solitary, toiling robots, however competent, are only part of the story. Today, and for some decades into the future, the most effective computing machines work as tools in human hands. As the machinery grows in flexibility and initiative, this association between humans and machines will be more properly described as a partnership. In time, the relationship will become much more intimate, a symbiosis where the boundary between the “natural” and the “artificial” partner is no longer evident. This collaborative route is interesting for its powerful human consequences even if, as I believe, it will matter little in the long run whether or not humans are an intimate part of the evolving artificial intelligences.
Also, unimportant but cool: Check out his musing about the Fermi Paradox:
A frightening explanation is that the universe is prowled by stealthy wolves that prey on fledgling technological races. The only civilizations that survive long would be ones that avoid detection by staying very quiet. But wouldn’t the wolves be more technically advanced than their prey and if so what could they gain from their raids? Our autonomous-message idea suggests an odd answer The wolves may be simply helpless bits of data that, in the absence of civilizations, can only lie dormant in multimillion-year trips between galaxies or even inscribed on rocks. Only when a newly evolved, country bumpkin of a technological civilization stumbles and naively acts on one does its eons-old sophistication and ruthlessness, honed over the bodies of countless past victims, become apparent. Then it engineers a reproductive orgy that kills its host and propagates astronomical numbers of copies of itself into the universe, each capable only of waiting patiently for another victim to arise. It is a strategy already familiar to us on a small scale, for it is used by the viruses that plague biological organisms.
While this theory is not nearly as good as the theory I prefer (life is hard, aliens are rare) it strikes me as comparably plausible to the Dark Forest theory. I wonder why I hadn’t heard of it before.
actually, the premise of david brin’s existence is a close match to moravec’s paragraph (not a coincidence, i bet, given that david hung around similar circles).
Adding to what Paul said: jacob_cannell points to this comment which claims that in Mind Children Moravec predicted human-level AGI in 2028.
I just went and skimmed Mind Children. He’s predicting human-equivalent computational power on a personal computer in 40 years. He seems to say that humans will within 50 years be surpassed in every important way by machines (page 70, below), but I haven’t found a more precise or short-term statement yet.
Also, unimportant but cool: Check out his musing about the Fermi Paradox:
While this theory is not nearly as good as the theory I prefer (life is hard, aliens are rare) it strikes me as comparably plausible to the Dark Forest theory. I wonder why I hadn’t heard of it before.
Those Fermi Paradox musings sound like the plot of A Fire Upon the Deep!
actually, the premise of david brin’s existence is a close match to moravec’s paragraph (not a coincidence, i bet, given that david hung around similar circles).