Fiction to Fact: The Emergence of AGI
The world of science fiction always seemed to be light years away from reality. Though many remember days of playing snake on our Nokia bricks we live in a world where new technological advancements are made every day and the rate of these improvements is increasing exponentially. Now it seems as though there’s potential for every problem to have its solution in AI, from the constant news on medical imaging and driverless cars to the hidden AI working behind the scenes to tell Netflix which movie thumbnail we’re most likely to click, and ads subconsciously guiding our political views. Are we that far away from those stories?
It is no secret that the AI of today is a powerful tool. However, while they can surpass trained doctors in identifying tumours and beat chess champions, when you pit the same software against new challenges a different story is told. While the software we write excels at specific tasks, it is only capable of performing what we enable it to perform. The next frontier of AI development is that of artificial general intelligence, an intelligence able to perform any task with paralleled, if not surpassed, ability to a human.

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Think of the AI you see in movies; From the Terminator to Marvin, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the artificial intelligence we observe in media is often that of artificial superintelligence. They are not restricted to basic tasks but can instead perform anything they want to, much as humans do, without the need for extensive programming and large sets of data.
This seems a far cry from the Weak AI we use today, yet many experts believe that the technology of fiction is on the horizon, with a 50% chance of its emergence by 2099; some even believe we may develop AGI as early as 2030. And while companies such as Microsoft and Elon Musk's OpenAI are investing in research to make this a reality, it is less a question of "if" and instead "when".
Considering just how much we have watched technology progress in our lifetimes, it is more likely than we think that we will see AI fiction become AI fact.
(Thumbnail Source: https://becominghuman.ai)