This was an independent project with guidance and support from Vael Gates and Richard Korzekwa--thank you both for your mentorship!
This project was inspired by a prompt from the AI Impacts project:
For intellectual skills where machines have surpassed humans, find out how long it took to go from the worst performance to average human skill, and from average human skill to superhuman skill.
I initially tried to answer this question for several task areas. But over the course of this project, I pivoted more towards analyzing the advantages and disadvantages computer programs have over humans in each task, including the sources of error. I made this pivot mostly for practical reasons. For some tasks, machine programs... (read 6231 more words →)