Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion

By Vincent C. Müller, Nick Bostrom. 2025

524 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is, in some quarters, concern about high–level machine intelligence and superintelligent AI coming up in a few decades, bringing with it significant risks for humanity. In other quarters, these issues are ignored or considered science fiction. We wanted to clarify what the distribution of opinions actually is, what probability the best experts currently assign to high–level machine intelligence coming up within a particular time–frame, which risks they see with that development, and how fast they see these developing. We thus designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040–2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, AI Ethics, Fairness & Society, Philosophy

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Citations in the corpus

Ethics of artificial intelligence and robotics (2020, background): “The actual acceleration and its speeds are discussed in (Müller and Bostrom 2016; Bostrom, Dafoe, and Flynn forthcoming); while (Sandberg 2019) argues that progress will continue for some time.”
The Forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) Revolution: Its Impact on Society and Firms (2017, background): “In a similar survey Muller and Bostrom (2013) asked hundreds of AI experts at a series of conference the following: “For the purposes of this question, assume that human scientific activity continues without major negative disruption.”
The Ethics of AI Ethics: An Evaluation of Guidelines (2019, background): “the danger of a malevolent AGI or existential threats is not discussed in any of the ethics guidelines, even though this is a thoroughly discussed topic in other contexts (Bostrom 2014; Tegmark 2017; Müller and Bostrom 2016; Omohundro 2014). This may be due to the fact that most of the guidelines ar”
How artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing (2019, background): “However, such capabilities remain distant; a 2016 survey of AI researchers indicated there was only a 50% chance of achieving context awareness (or its equivalent) by 2050 (Müller and Bostrom 2016).”
The General Attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence Scale (GAAIS): Confirmatory Validation and Associations with Personality, Corporate Distrust, and General Trust (2022, background): “Given that some experts signaled negative predictions about the impact of AI on society (Anderson et al., 2018; M € uller & Bostrom, 2016), it is interesting to see that expertise led to positive associations with both subscales of the GAAIS, with those possessing higher levels of computer…”
Expert and Non-expert Opinion About Technological Unemployment (2017, background): “y out most human professions at least as well as a typical human. In 2012/2013, Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom surveyed 170 people working in AI to predict when HLMI might be achieved [Müller and Bostrom 2014]. As there is significant uncertainty as to when HLMI might be achieved, they asked whe”