Current trends in AI are nothing if not remarkable. Day after day, we hear stories about systems and machines taking on tasks that, until very recently, we saw as the exclusive and permanent preserve of humankind: making medical diagnoses, drafting legal documents, designing buildings, and even composing music. Our concern here, though, is with something even more striking: the prospect of high-level machine intelligence systems that outperform human beings at essentially every task. This is not science fiction. In a recent survey the median estimate among leading computer scientists reported a 50% chance that this technology would arrive within 45 years.

Many AI experts predict that machines may outperform humans at every task within 45 years.