Bruce Klein emailed a poll:

  Gregory, quick question... when do you think
  AI will surpass human-level intelligence?

  [ ] 2010-20
  [ ] 2020-30
  [ ] 2030-50
  [ ] 2050-70
  [ ] 2070-2100
  [ ] Beyond 2100
  [ ] Prefer not to make predictions
  [ ] Other: __

  Survey sent to a few friends to gain a better
  perspective on time-frame... results posted:
  www.novamente.net/bruce_blog

  Thanks!
  Bruce

To which I responded:

Bruce,

That depends on what you call 'AI', and what you mean by 'surpass'. If we define intelligence as the ability to solve problems, and define 'artificial intelligence' as the ability of non-biological elements to solve problems, and if we take 'surpass' to mean 'better able to solve problems than a single human mind can', then we're long there.

We've long had superhuman levels of intelligence composed, first, of groups of people who collectively surpass the ability of single humans, and, second, we have computer-human composites that easily surpass human intelligence. (I.E. - Your mind, plus a computer, can easily solve a wide range of problems that your mind alone cannot). The fraction that non-biological intelligence contributes to problem-solving is steadily increasing. There are many areas in which the non-biological contribution is critical. For example, up until the early 1980's, it was still possible for a dedicated band of Electronic Engineers, armed with film and tape, to tape-out a microprocessor mask by hand. Now, with current generation CPUs boasting over a half-billion transistors, a full tape-out (they still use that quaintly anachronistic term, kind of like 'core dump') would require many square miles of acetate and a team of millions. This is just for the physical representation of the masks needed. Nowadays, physical emulation is also critical to calculate paths and gaps, fields, crosstalk, etc., involving far more computation than any army of dedicated humans could ever hope to pull off using pure biology, no matter how diligent or motivated. What's more, each generation of chips requires exponentially more computation to create. So we are already beyond a certain tipping-point: non-biological intelligence is now increasingly required to recursively design itself, and each generation of this recursion is required in order to design the next.

One could argue that the threshold of AI contribution to problem-solving exceeding that of humans has already long passed, at least as far as modern IC design is concerned. So, you see, it is a fuzzy question, with a fuzzy answer. By some measures, I'd say it happened sometime in the late-1980's, when the contribution of non-biological intelligence to many areas of problem-solving exceeded a level that humans alone, no matter how many or how driven, could ever match.

Going forward, we will be faced with growing fuzziness of this question and answer, as bandwidth of interfaces between humans and machines and between humans and other humans grows. The boundaries that are now clearly delineated by sensory bottlenecks may crumble, as neural interfaces allow augmentation of biological intelligence with non-biological components, and our cherished sense of individuality becomes increasingly ambiguous with sensory and other neural information directly leaping 'the great synapse' that now stands between us as individuals. Ultimately, non-biological emulation of biological intelligence will also crumble our current notions of existence, as biological emulations can be instantiated and destroyed at will, adding specific facets of intelligence to our problem-solving abilities on an as-needed basis. Such 'facets' are only bounded by emulation capabilities, and could easily be far greater than the current biologically-constrained intelligence that each of us carries. Future intelligence may instantiate and discard more sentient brainpower than all of us now possess, many times a day.

Short answer - it's already happened. Welcome to the singularity.

Greg