Take the question, “How long will it be until we have human-level AI?” The responses I’ve seen to this are all over the map. On one memorable occasion, a mainstream AI guy said to me, “Five hundred years.” (!!) Now the reason why time-to-AI is just not very predictable, is a long discussion in its own right. But it’s not as if the guy who said “Five hundred years” was looking into the future to find out. And he can’t have gotten the number using the standard bogus method with Moore’s Law. So what did the number 500 mean?
