It seems, from looking at the video, that there was some misunderstanding about exactly what question was being asked—e.g., I think that when the person asking the question said “90 years” he meant “within the next 90 years” but at least some in the audience interpreted it as something more like “about 90 years from now”. (Observe the reactions when some new hands go up at the “50 years” mark.) Then they went down in 10 year intervals, as far as “10 years”; a reasonable number of people picked 10 years, and again I think some took it to mean “about 10 years” and some to mean “within 10 years”. And then he asked “who thinks less than 10 years?”. If I’d been in the audience, at this point I’d have been quite confused about how any given answer was being interpreted.
Although it doesn’t really make much sense, I strongly suspect that at least some people in the audience (1) thought the likely time before computers started beating good humans at go was <=10 years, (2) raised their hands at the “10 years” mark, and then (3) put them down again when the questioner asked “less than 10 years”, perhaps thinking that he must really mean something like “too soon to be rounded off to 10 years”.
The audience was, even so, clearly too pessimistic, and I think OP is right to suggest that that’s at least partly because Ken Thompson went out of his way to remind people that some predictions for this kind of thing are overoptimistic, and to give his own highly pessimistic opinion—but I think confusion as well as pessimism is responsible for the specific outcome reported here.
(Also, it looks to me as if a lot of people in the audience never raised their hands. That might mean that they thought computers wouldn’t be competitive in go even after a century of progress—but it might also mean that for whatever reason they didn’t care to make a public prediction.)
Yeah—when the person asking the question said, “90 years,” and the Turing award winners raised some hands, couldn’t they be interpreted to be specifying a wide confidence interval, which is what you should do when you know you don’t have domain expertise with which to predict the future?
I also want to register that this kind of auction is known to bias upward for human participants. (I think it’s a Dutch auction but not sure, and currently traveling, so can’t properly look it up). There still seems to be an effect here, but I do think there were also a lot of biases upwards coming together.
It seems, from looking at the video, that there was some misunderstanding about exactly what question was being asked—e.g., I think that when the person asking the question said “90 years” he meant “within the next 90 years” but at least some in the audience interpreted it as something more like “about 90 years from now”. (Observe the reactions when some new hands go up at the “50 years” mark.) Then they went down in 10 year intervals, as far as “10 years”; a reasonable number of people picked 10 years, and again I think some took it to mean “about 10 years” and some to mean “within 10 years”. And then he asked “who thinks less than 10 years?”. If I’d been in the audience, at this point I’d have been quite confused about how any given answer was being interpreted.
Although it doesn’t really make much sense, I strongly suspect that at least some people in the audience (1) thought the likely time before computers started beating good humans at go was <=10 years, (2) raised their hands at the “10 years” mark, and then (3) put them down again when the questioner asked “less than 10 years”, perhaps thinking that he must really mean something like “too soon to be rounded off to 10 years”.
The audience was, even so, clearly too pessimistic, and I think OP is right to suggest that that’s at least partly because Ken Thompson went out of his way to remind people that some predictions for this kind of thing are overoptimistic, and to give his own highly pessimistic opinion—but I think confusion as well as pessimism is responsible for the specific outcome reported here.
(Also, it looks to me as if a lot of people in the audience never raised their hands. That might mean that they thought computers wouldn’t be competitive in go even after a century of progress—but it might also mean that for whatever reason they didn’t care to make a public prediction.)
Crazy Stone was already beating good humans at the time the event was held. It just wasn’t beating professionals.
Yeah—when the person asking the question said, “90 years,” and the Turing award winners raised some hands, couldn’t they be interpreted to be specifying a wide confidence interval, which is what you should do when you know you don’t have domain expertise with which to predict the future?
I also want to register that this kind of auction is known to bias upward for human participants. (I think it’s a Dutch auction but not sure, and currently traveling, so can’t properly look it up). There still seems to be an effect here, but I do think there were also a lot of biases upwards coming together.