It is now more than a decade since I took my first ride in a self-driving car. As a Google prototype zipped me around Mountain View in Silicon Valley, what promised to be an exhilarating taste of the future quickly became quite boring — the robot car was just such a smooth driver. A 2017 deadline for bringing autonomous vehicles to market, which was set in 2012 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, seemed aggressive but not implausible.
Of course, Google failed that deadline, just as Elon Musk’s Tesla has done over the years on autonomous vehicles.
I was reminded of these shaky timelines when reading Sam Altman’s new year’s “reflections”. The OpenAI chief is “now confident we know how to build” artificial general intelligence — the point at which AI’s capabilities surpass those of most humans — and predicts that “in 2025, we may see the first AI agents join the workforce”.