Artificial Intelligence is changing the world and at an extremely fast speed. The challenge and promise are that the intelligent machines will be able to do every task with an exceedingly precise manner and at far cheaper rates. Here arises the question: When will machines be doing your jobs better than you? The field is so complex and has many sub disciplines that there are a fewer number of people who can forecast when these breakthroughs will come.
The researchers at the Oxford University from the Future of Humanity Institute decided to crowdsource the problem. They contacted 1634 researchers who have published papers at the ICML and the 2015 NIPS conferences- two of the leading machine learning conferences. They then asked them to complete a survey on the topic and received reverts from 352 researchers.
When the combined result of researcher’s answers was generated; the aggregate response was- there is a 50% chance of unaided machines accomplishing tasks efficiently than human workers within a time period of 45 years and a 10% chance of it occurring in the next nine years. However, there was a huge discrepancy in the views of Asians who expect it taking 30 years and the North Americans who are expecting it to take 74 long years.
As soon as the question was slightly worded; when will human labor be automated? The aggregate forecast towards it went to a 50 percent chance in next 122 years from now and 10 chances for 20 years.
The survey was also asking for some predictions for few activities like translating languages (by 2024), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), and working as a surgeon (by 2053).
Besides these predictions, there were some useful findings from the survey that were obtained like; an advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning is accelerating. Apart from this, a huge majority of researchers believed that machines performing better than humans would have a positive impact on beings.