Published 29 December, 2014; last updated 10 December, 2020
A seemingly informal seven-question poll was taken of participants at the AI@50 conference in 2006. 41% of respondents said it would take more than 50 years for AI to simulate every aspect of human intelligence, and 41% said it would never happen.
One question was “when will computers be able to simulate every aspect of human intelligence?” 41% of respondents said “More than 50 years” and 41% said “Never”.
We do not know how many people participated in the conference or in the poll.
Luke Muehlhauser points out that many of the respondents were probably college students, rather than experts, and that the question may have been interpreted as asking in part about the possibility of machine consciousness.
Information about the poll was available at http://web.archive.org/web/20110710193831/http://www.engagingexperience.com/ai50/ when we put up this page, but it has since become inaccessible. Secondary descriptions of parts of it exist at https://intelligence.org/2013/05/15/when-will-ai-be-created/#footnote_2_10199 and http://sethbaum.com/ac/2011_AI-Experts.pdf