Artificial intelligence: How advanced will AI be in 2100?

As good as the human brain - or part of it?

It's 55 years since the term artificial intelligence was coined. But how advanced will AI be in 2050 and in 2100? silicon.com quizzed some of the field's foremost thinkers to find out...

Hugh Loebner, inventor
That's hard to say. [Mathematician and scientist Alan] Turing, I believe, thought his test would be passed by 2050. I suppose that by 2100 we'll have human equivalent or superior machines.

2050? That's past the Singularity [the point when machine intelligence outpaces that of humans].

As I articulate in my book The Singularity is Near, computation is growing at a doubly exponential rate. Computers today are billions of times more powerful per dollar than when I was an undergraduate and we will do that again in 25 years. Software is also growing in sophistication and we are well on our way to completely reverse-engineering the human brain within 20 years.

That is also following an exponential progression. We will have fully human-level (Turing-test capable) AI by 2029. These human-like capabilities will combine with the ways that machines are already superior in terms of sharing knowledge at speeds that are a million times faster than human language, and other advantages. We will merge with this intelligent technology and become a hybrid of biological and nonbiological intelligence, except that the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will continue to expand exponentially. So our brains will expand their capacity a billion-fold by 2045 through this merger and ongoing exponential advance of information technology.

By 2100, that expansion will be trillions of trillions-fold and we will begin to expand beyond our solar system.

Eric Horvitz, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
This is hard to predict right now but I'll mention one area. I foresee a great deal of work on building systems that work in a complementary way with people, where the computing system complements human skills.

I see the development of increasingly sophisticated systems that work very closely with people in a complementary manner to assist them with their goals, to help them to remember things they might forget, and to ensure their privacy.

It's very difficult to tell where AI will be in 40 years' or 50 years' time - really difficult... I expect to see a lot of autonomous operation in robots.

I would expect certainly one thing for sure would be autonomous cars... We're going to see a lot of robots as receptionists I think - see robots in medicine, that's going to be one of the great breakthroughs... I would hope that in 50 years' time you'd be able to get your appendix removed by machine and also it means you could take a machine down the motorway and have it operate on people rather than rush them to hospital and have them die on the way, which is one of the common things, so those areas I think will be very big.

But it depends on what society does and whether we go the technological route, so I couldn't possibly give a prediction that I would think would be true.

I feel that by 2050 we will have gone through the Singularity and it will either be that intelligent machines actually dominant - The Terminator scenario - or it will be cyborgs, upgraded humans.

I really, by 2050, can't see humans still being the dominant species. I just cannot believe that the development of machine intelligence would have been so slow as to not bring that about.

So I think we will have to have upgraded with implants by 2050, so by 2100 - it's very difficult to predict that far ahead but hopefully cyborgs will have developed and we will be able to communicate just by thinking and we will have multidimensional thought and some of those abilities so it'll be a tremendously exciting time if you're a cyborg in 2100.

Top photo credit: null0 via Flickr.com under the following Creative Commons licence
Middle and bottom photo credits: Chris Beaumont/CBS Interactive