As part of the conversations recorded in this book, I asked each participant to give me his or her best guess for a date when there would be at least a 50 percent probability that artificial general intelligence (or human-level AI) will have been achieved. The results of this very informal survey are shown below.
A number of the individuals I spoke with were reluctant to attempt a guess at a specific year. Many pointed out that the path to AGI is highly uncertain and that there are an unknown number of hurdles that will need to be surmounted. Despite my best persuasive efforts, five people declined to give a guess. Most of the remaining 18 preferred that their individual guess remain anonymous.
As I noted in the introduction, the guesses are neatly bracketed by two people willing to provide dates on the record: Ray Kurzweil at 2029 and Rodney Brooks at 2200.
Here are the 18 guesses:
2029 11 years from 2018
2036 18 years
2038 20...