About 10 percent of A.I. researchers believe the first machine with human-level intelligence will arrive in the next 10 years. Nearly all think it will be accomplished by century's end.

My first thought upon reading this was "Holy crap! Really?!" as I began revising my own probability/risk estimates. Then I realized that people probably also said this in the 1950s. How much are other people updating on this?

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[-]Paul Crowley11y90

This looks to me like a misunderstanding of Müller & Bostrom 2014. The actual figure is that 50% of AI researchers give a 10% probability of HLMI by 2022.

Müller, V. C., & Bostrom, N. Future progress in artificial intelligence: A survey of expert opinion. In V. C. Müller (Ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer. 2014

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[-]danieldewey11y70

That's what I thought at first, too, but then I looked at the paper, and their figure looks right to me. Could you check my reasoning here?

On p.11 of Vincent's and Nick's survey, there's a graph "Proportion of experts with 10%/50%/90% confidence of HLMI by that date". At around the the 1 in 10 mark of proportion of experts -- the horizontal line from 0.1 -- the graph shows that 1 in 10 experts thought there was a 50% chance of HLAI by 2020 or so (the square-boxes-line), and 1 in 10 thought there was a 90% chance of HLAI by 2030 or so (the triangles-line). So, maybe 1 in 10 researchers think there's a 70% chance of HLAI by 2025 or so, which is roughly in line with the journalist's remark.

Did I do that right? Do you think the graph is maybe incorrect? I haven't checked the number against other parts of the paper.

There's a good chance that the reviewer got the right number by accident, I think, but it doesn't seem far enough away to call out.

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