I remember watching a panel discussion with some CEOs and some industry engineering veterans, I think hosted by NVIDIA, in 2016. The CEOs were saying we'd have self driving cars all over the roads by 2019, and the engineering veterans were saying we'd maybe have partial deployments by 2023. It's interesting that the veterans seem to have made accurate predictions.
I think what we see are CEOs looking to raise funds, and news organizations looking to sell an interesting story that will say "revolutionary tech is just around the corner", but this is motivated reasoning. You're right that this is the same with AI technology, where some people say AGI is just around the corner, whereas some veterans say it may well be decades still, and the truth is we don't know.
So anyway I guess I agree with what you are saying, which is that AI development is difficult to predict and many people make bad predictions. I just wanted to point out that it tends to be people with a motivation to predict rapid growth that tend to produce a lot of these errors. These errors get propagated widely because technology press is one of those groups with this bias. However not everyone makes such bad predictions.
I think what we see are CEOs looking to raise funds, and news organizations looking to sell an interesting story that will say "revolutionary tech is just around the corner", but this is motivated reasoning. You're right that this is the same with AI technology, where some people say AGI is just around the corner, whereas some veterans say it may well be decades still, and the truth is we don't know.
So anyway I guess I agree with what you are saying, which is that AI development is difficult to predict and many people make bad predictions. I just wanted to point out that it tends to be people with a motivation to predict rapid growth that tend to produce a lot of these errors. These errors get propagated widely because technology press is one of those groups with this bias. However not everyone makes such bad predictions.