Other voices predicting AI by 2020

In the main post above I stated human level AI could be probably built within roughly a decade, by 2020.

That is much sooner than the conventional wisdom in the AI community. But there are some very knowledgeable people who share my guess of approximately 2020. And some of them have considerable resources to throw at the problem.

In a Google Tech Talk, recorded in May 2006, Doug Lenat, mentioned in passing that Sergey Brin, one of the two founders of Google, had said AI could be built by 2020. Doug Lenat is head of Cycorp, the corporate continuation of one of the largest and longest big-AI projects. Lenat’s talk is at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068 . It provides a good overview of Cycorp ‘s Cyc system, and has an amusing introduction of Doug by Peter Norvig, co-author of one of the leading textbooks on AI and Google’s director of research.

In response to Lenat’s statement about Brin’s projection, I did a brief web search to see if I could find exactly what Brin had said about achieving AI by 2020. I was unable to find any other reference to the quote. But I did find the following information relevant to Google’s pursuit of AI and to the 2020 estimate.

As was cited on multiple web sites --- including http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2007/02/20/google-developing-artificial-intelligence-ai-brave-new-world --- Google’s Larry Page said at the 2007 conference for the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences, that researchers at Google were working upon developing Artificial Intelligence. He said human brain algorithms actually weren’t all that complicated and could likely be approximated with sufficient computational power. He said, “We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale. It’s not as far off as people think.”

According to http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/index.php?s=brin : Sergey Brin is reported to have said that the perfect search engine would “look like the mind of God“. Similar ideas, but less extravagantly worded, have come from Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience when she talked about how Google’s massive data stores and sophisticated algorithms are acting more and more like “intelligence”.

In 2008 Nicholas Carr --- who served as executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, and who has written extensively on information technology --- wrote a book entitled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. A review of it, at http://computersight.com/computers/the-big-switch-rewiring-the-world-from-edison-to-google-by-nicholas-carr/ , says:
“the book discussed the future of computing. The main discussion was with Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, about their dream of what their search engine will do in the coming years. According to Page and Brin, artificial intelligence is the main goal of those behind the future of Google. Google wants to link the human brain with the computer to share its search engine. The author also spoke about advancements Microsoft and other Computer Scientists want for the future of computing. …According to Carr, in 2020, Google’s dream may come true.”
At http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/11/google-carr-computing-tech-enter-cx_ag_0111computing.html , Andy Greenberg of Forbes.com interviews Carr about his book. Below is an excerpt:
[AG]Looking further ahead at Google's intentions, you write in The Big Switch that Google's ultimate plan is to create artificial intelligence. How does this follow from what the company's doing today?

[NC] It's pretty clear from what [Google co-founders] Larry Page and Sergey Brin have said in interviews that Google sees search as essentially a basic form of artificial intelligence. A year ago, Google executives said the company had achieved just 5% of its complete vision of search. That means, in order to provide the best possible results, Google's search engine will eventually have to know what people are thinking, how to interpret language, even the way users' brains operate.

Google has lots of experts in artificial intelligence working on these problems, largely from an academic perspective. But from a business perspective, artificial intelligence's effects on search results or advertising would mean huge amounts of money.

[AG] You've also suggested that Google wants to physically integrate search with the human brain.

[NC]This may sound like science fiction, but if you take Google's founders at their word, this is one of their ultimate goals. The idea is that you no longer have to sit down at a keyboard to locate information. It becomes automatic, a sort of machine-mind meld. Larry Page has discussed a scenario where you merely think of a question, and Google whispers the answer into your ear through your cellphone.

[AG] What would an ultra-intelligent Google of the future look like?


[NC]I think it's pretty clear that Google believes that there will eventually be an intelligence greater than what we think of today as human intelligence. Whether that comes out of all the world's computers networked together, or whether it comes from computers integrated with our brains, I don't know, and I'm not sure that Google knows. But the top executives at Google say that the company's goal is to pioneer that new form of intelligence. And the more closely that they can replicate or even expand how peoples' mind works, the more money they make.

[AG] You don't seem very optimistic about a future where Google is smarter than humans.

[NC]I think if Google's users were aware of that intention, they might be less enthusiastic about the prospect than the mathematicians and computer scientists at Google seem to be. A lot of people are worried that a superior intelligence would mean for human beings.

I'm not talking about Google robots walking around and pushing humans into lines. But Google seems intent on creating a machine that's able to do a lot of our thinking for us. When we begin to rely on a machine for memory and decision making, you have to wonder what happens to our free will.
At http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-keen12jul12,1,1010933.story?ctrack=1&cset=true , Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reported to have said in 2007:
“By 2012, he wants Google to be able to tell all of us what we want. This technology, what Google co-founder Larry Page calls the "perfect search engine," might not only replace our shrinks but also all those marketing professionals whose livelihoods are based on predicting — or guessing — consumer desires.”
The article also says
“iGoogle is growing into a tightly-knit suite of services — personalized homepage, search engine, blog, e-mail system, mini-program gadgets, Web-browsing history, etc. — that together will create the world's most intimate information database. On iGoogle, we all get to aggregate our lives, consciously or not, so artificially intelligent software can sort out our desires. It will piece together our recent blog posts, where we've been online, our e-commerce history and cultural interests. It will amass so much information about each of us that eventually it will be able to logically determine what we want to do tomorrow and what job we want.”
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/196706/bt_futurist_ai_entities_will_win_nobel_prizes_by_2020/ is an article about Ian Peterson, chief futurologist at British Telecom. In it he says:
“We will probably make conscious machines sometime between 2015 and 2020, I think. But it probably won't be like you and I. It will be conscious and aware of itself and it will be conscious in pretty much the same way as you and I, but it will work in a very different way. It will be an alien. It will be a different way of thinking from us, but nonetheless still thinking”
In response to the interviewer pointing out that

“…as soon as machines become intelligent, according to Moore's Law they will soon surpass humans. By the way, BT's 2006 technology timeline predicts that AI entities will be awarded with Nobel prizes by 2020, and soon after robots will become mentally superior to humans. What comes after that: the super intelligence or God 2.0? “

Peterson responds

“I think that I would certainly still go along with those time frames for superhuman intelligence, but I won't comment on God 2.0. I think that we still should expect a conscious computer smarter than people by 2020. I still see no reason why that it is not going to happen in that time frame. But I don't think we will understand it. The reason is because we don't even understand how some of the principal functions of consciousness should work. “
Of course, Microsoft Research is also putting a lot of effort into artificial intelligence research. A March 2, 2009 New York Times article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/technology/business-computing/02compute.html , reports on some of Microsoft’s efforts in the field. Among other interesting things it says:
“Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, expects to see computing systems that are about 50 to 100 times more powerful than today’s systems by 2013.

“Most important, the new chips will consume about the same power as current chips, making possible things like a virtual assistant with voice- and facial-recognition skills that are embedded into an office door.

“We think that in five years’ time, people will be able to use computers to do things that today are just not accessible to them,” Mr. Mundie said during a speech last week. “You might find essentially a medical doctor in a box, so to speak, in the form of your computer that could help you with basic, nonacute care, medical problems that today you can get no medical support for.”

“With such technology in hand, Microsoft predicts a future filled with a vast array of devices much better equipped to deal with speech, artificial intelligence and the processing of huge databases.”
So, in sum, there is good reason to believe there will be an explosion in AI in the next ten years.