When Will AI Perform Better than Humans: Here's What Experts Think

AI is going to be the next big wave of innovation and prosperity when it comes to economic development and core skill generation. There will be so many jobs started off from AI’s core architecture, totally incredible! There is a lot of scope behind much of what AI has shown itself to be, and the future is unpredictable at best.

However, a lot of the experts believe that AI will be the next big thing across all industries. Not only will our jobs be influenced heavily by AI, our daily lives will be as well. We will be able to process information at a much higher speed and get everything we desire on the spot. 100 years from now, we won’t even recognize the generations that lived in 2018.

AI is changing the world and it's doing so faster and better each year. The promise of AI is alluring – better, faster and smarter. You can’t do much in the future without using AI, and at some level, it’s going to be a lot cheaper to hire bots than humans. There is no rest period for an AI robot and there are no breaks necessary when employing robots. While many manufacturing industries have seen many layoffs over the years, there will be new employment for new types of jobs shortly.

Researcher Katja Grace at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford underwent a series of research processes to determine when AI will take over humans across a wide range of tasks.

Katja worked with more than 1600 experts to get the best estimates of when humans will be taken over by AI. She spoke with experts in academia and industry, who had a bird’s eye view of the action. The experts present at conferences, speaking of arrangements and events were also collectively given several parameters to gauge their response. Some of the world’s leading engineers and scientists were on this list too.

All in all, there were about 1634 respondents who filled out the AI survey.

The results were surprising.

The experts predicted that AI will overshoot human capability in the next 10 years in many critical tasks. Things like translating languages, high school homework, and driving trucks will be completely gone within the decade. The most surprising aspect of this prediction is that it’s quite conservative. However, looking at recent problems that AI has had with many areas including natural language processing and self-driving vehicles.

Facebook’s algorithm started to develop its own language and it got to a point where they had to shut it all down. Tesla’s cars got into a major accident. There is a lot of scope for improvement here, and it’s best to keep things conservative when talking about complete automation and overwhelming changes.

What we need to talk about is the impending wages drop over the years leading to AI. When driving a truck doesn’t become more profitable than earning minimum wage, that’s when human drivers will simply not to drive anymore. This happens when we think about automation in general. It’s not that overnight, there will be thousands of jobs lost.

It’s more a symptom of where things are going and how low the wages can fall. As they gradually get lower, the labor pool will flush itself out. The process continuous across all industries, including teaching, manufacturing, and development.

There are certain jobs that are still safe from complete automation.

The creative act of writing a bestselling book will be overtaken by robots by 2050, and a surgeon’s job is in danger in 2053. That’s when markets start to realize the potential of AI and how well it can do complex tasks in little time.

Blockchain would have also reached its peak by then, meaning that computers will be learning from each other at a rapid pace. This also means that within the next 50 years, we may see complete automation in mid-skilled jobs as well. There may not be much left over in the next half a century to come. We might have to develop a new economy, on the backs of what we lose in this one.

Right now, the experts give a 50-50 chance at AI being better than humans in the next 50 years. That’s a scary estimate if we think about it conservatively. We don’t have a backup plan when we start to leverage the AI technology, and we may have to rely on self-based solutions. Since wages will go down, we may have to become more self-sufficient for less and train our children to become AI engineers of the future.

While this is the median of the scope of tech, there is an interesting bend in the way that respondents approach the problem of AI. North American researchers expect AI to overtake humans in 74 years, while Asians think it's going to happen at 30 years.

30 years certainly seem like too fast a prediction, but if that’s where they’re going then that’s an interesting insight into what the Asian market wants. If the North American population believes that AI may not take their jobs in the next 70 years, then that’s indicative of their innovation and global power. This means that jobs may just start going away faster in Asia than in the US, leaving many to guess what’s next for them.

What this means for companies, people, and governments, is that they need to start training individuals in AI right now.

Conclusion

AI is all set to take over much of what we consider to be critical work. We can’t think of another way to process out these predictions, but we can be on the positive side of things and create success. Companies that work with AI will benefit from those that will fight it. There are so many things that we can achieve within the next few years, and AI will be at the center of it all. With many roads ahead of us, we must choose the one with maximum returns and minimum fallback.