Your job might be automated within 120 years, AI experts reckon

Hundreds of AI researchers have taken a glimpse into their crystal balls to try to determine when machines will finally exceed human capabilities. A survey run by the Future of Humanity Institute, a research center that studies existential risks at the University of Oxford in the UK and Yale University in the US, asked 352 machine learning researchers to predict how AI will progress. "Researchers believe there is a 50 per cent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years," according to the results published on arXiv. It's a tricky question and opinions vary wildly. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been vocal about humanity's doom at AI takeover, whereas researchers like Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, and Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, have a more conservative attitude. The survey asks the question: "When will AI exceed human performance?"