As part of a new Contrafabulists’ project, we are monitoring predictions that technologists and marketers make each week:

“Voice-based computing will be everywhere, listening to what we say, learning from what we ask,” Buzzfeed predicts. There’s no date for this prediction – just the “not-too-distant future.”

The MIT Technology Review provides the results of a survey: “Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Exceed Human Performance.”

The experts predict that AI will outperform humans in the next 10 years in tasks such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high school essays (by 2026), and driving trucks (by 2027).

But many other tasks will take much longer for machines to master. AI won’t be better than humans at working in retail until 2031, able to write a bestselling book until 2049, or capable of working as a surgeon until 2053.

The experts are far from infallible. They predicted that AI would be better than humans at Go by about 2027. (This was in 2015, remember.) In fact, Google’s DeepMind subsidiary has already developed an artificial intelligence capable of beating the best humans. That took two years rather than 12. It’s easy to think that this gives the lie to these predictions.

The experts go on to predict a 50 percent chance that AI will be better than humans at more or less everything in about 45 years.

From The Economist: “A toolkit for predicting the future.” It’s not so much a toolkit but three pretty obvious places one should look in order to gauge what’s going to happen: the past, the present, and science fiction.

Painting: The Fortune Teller by Caravaggio