This was an independent project with guidance and support from Vael Gates and Richard Korzekwa--thank you both for your mentorship!

Introduction

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 are only tested against expert human performance, making them difficult to compare to “beginner” and “average” humans. In other tasks, the differences between human and machine performance are qualitative rather than quantitative. It seemed most appropriate to describe how machines and humans differ in performance rather than quantify it. I used this information to predict whether AI will replace or augment humans in performing these task areas.

I picked five task areas, each representing different aspects of human cognition:

Poker-playing (strategy and interdependent decision-making)
Image classification (a key subset of vision and perception)
Text-summarization (interpreting and manipulating text)
Creating static visual art (aesthetics and ingenuity)
Human-like dexterity (manipulating physical objects)

Here is a summary of my conclusions:

Task	Current capabilities
Poker	Superhuman (consistently)
Image classification	Superhuman (usually)
Text-summarization	Average human (unreliable)
Static visual art	Superhuman (but requires human input)
Human-like dexterity	Below humans (except specific tasks)

See "Discussion / Personal Predictions" section for my predictions in how AI will machines will replace or augment humans in these tasks.

Task 1: Poker

Poker-playing is a strong case study for many aspects of human decision-making. Most significantly, it involves strategic decision-making against an opponent. Strong poker players use betting strategies, each having different consequences, which correspond to risk management and strategy broadly. Unlike chess and checkers, poker requires deciding under imperfect knowledge since you never know y...

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