Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

In the largest survey of its kind, we surveyed 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems. The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model. If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. The latter estimate is 13 years earlier than that reached in a similar survey we conducted only one year earlier [Grace et al., 2022]. However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey).

Introduction. Artificial intelligence appears poised to reshape society. Decision-makers are working to address opportunities and threats due to AI in the private sector [OpenAI, 2023], academia [Center for Human-compatible Artificial Intelligence, 2023], and government at the state, national, and international levels [Newsom, 2023, AI.gov, 2023, Inter-Agency Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, 2022]. Navigating this situation requires judgments about how the progress and impact of AI are likely to unfold. However, there is a lack of apparent consensus among AI experts on the future of AI [Korzekwa and Stewart, 2023]. These judgments are difficult, and there are no established methods of making them well.

Discussion / Conclusion. Participants expressed a wide range of views on almost every question: some of the biggest areas of consensus are on how wide-open possibilities for the future appear to be. This uncertainty is striking, but several patterns of opinion are particularly informative. While the range of views on how long it will take for milestones to be feasible can be broad, this year’s survey saw a general shift towards earlier expectations. Over the fourteen months since the last survey [Grace et al., 2022], a similar participant pool expected human-level performance 13 to 48 years sooner on average (depending on how the question was phrased), and 21 out of 32 shorter term milestones are now expected earlier. Another striking pattern is widespread assignment of credence to extremely bad outcomes from AI. As in 2022, a majority of participants considered AI to pose at least a 5% chance of causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species, and this result was consistent across four different questions, two assigned to each participant. Across these same questions, between 38% and 51% placed at least 10% chance on advanced AI bringing these extinction-level outcomes (see Figure 13).