Gigaom AI Minute – May 6

Transcript

We recently surveyed Gigaom's audience about their views on artificial intelligence. Our audience it primarily made up of business people that have an interest in technology and I would like to use the next several AI minutes to explore the answers.

The sixth question was around an artificial general intelligence--that is an AI that is as smart and versatile as a human being. There were a series of statements we put before our audience, and asked, "Which of these did you agree with?" And they could answer more than one.

The first question was, are we on the right track to build one? And only 30% of the people said that they think that we are. When asked if it is true that no one has demonstrated that they know how to build one, 40% of the people said, "Yes, I agree with that." And then, the number of people who say that it may actually be impossible to build one is fully one quarter.

Now the prevalent view in Silicon Valley, is that we will build one, that, it's all but inevitable, and that it will come sometime in the 2050's or the 2060's, if you had to average all the guesses. But there's a sizable amount of our audience that thinks we may not actually be on the path at all and it may not be something that we can even do. Now, when asked about the impact of that AGI, we asked, "Do you think it might destroy us all, or do you think it might be a great benefit to humanity?" So, the "destroy us all" people who agreed with that statement were 20%--1-in-5 internalized that worry that an AGI could spell the end of our species--and the people who said, "it will be a great benefit to humanity," were 35%, almost 2-to-1. So, even though we may or may not be able to build one any time soon, there is more optimism about whether it would be good or not.