Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
Katja Grace Harlan Stewart Julia Fabienne Sandkühler Stephen Thomas Ben Weinstein-Raun Jan Brauner
In the largest survey of its kind, 2,778 researchers who had published in
top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues gave 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).
  Most respondents expressed substantial uncertainty about the long-term value
of AI progress: While 68.3% thought good outcomes from superhuman AI are more
likely than bad, of these net optimists 48% gave at least a 5% chance of
extremely bad outcomes such as human extinction, and 59% of net pessimists gave
5% or more to extremely good outcomes. Between 38% and 51% of respondents gave
at least a 10% chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human
extinction. More than half suggested that "substantial" or "extreme" concern is
warranted about six different AI-related scenarios, including misinformation,
authoritarian control, and inequality. There was disagreement about whether
faster or slower AI progress would be better for the future of humanity.
However, there was broad agreement that research aimed at minimizing potential
risks from AI systems ought to be prioritized more.