Future Forecasting The Yearly Path That Will Advance AI To Reach AGI By 2040

Forbes

2 days ago

Future forecasting the yearly path of advancing todays to AGI by 2040.
In today's column, I am continuing my special series on the likely pathways that will get us from conventional AI to the avidly sought attainment of AGI (artificial general intelligence). AGI would be a type of AI that is fully on par with human intellect in all respects. I've previously outlined seven major paths that seem to be the most probable routes of advancing AI to reach AGI (see the link here).
Here, I undertake an analytically speculative deep dive into one of those paths, namely I explore the year-by-year aspects of the considered most-expected route, the linear path. Other upcoming postings will cover each of the other remaining paths. The linear path consists of AI being advanced incrementally, one step at a time until we arrive at AGI.
Let's talk about it.
This analysis of an innovative AI breakthrough is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here).
First, some fundamentals are required to set the stage for this weighty discussion.
There is a great deal of research going on to further advance AI. The general goal is to either reach artificial general intelligence (AGI) or maybe even the outstretched possibility of achieving artificial superintelligence (ASI).
AGI is AI that is considered on par with human intellect and can seemingly match our intelligence. ASI is AI that has gone beyond human intellect and would be superior in many if not all feasible ways. The idea is that ASI would be able to run circles around humans by outthinking us at every turn. For more details on the nature of conventional AI versus AGI and ASI, see my analysis at the link here.
We have not yet attained AGI.
In fact, it is unknown as to whether we will reach AGI, or that maybe AGI will be achievable in decades or perhaps centuries from now. The AGI attainment dates that are floating around are wildly varying and wildly unsubstantiated by any credible evidence or ironclad logic. ASI is even more beyond the pale when it comes to where we are currently with conventional AI.
Right now, efforts to forecast when AGI is going to be attained consist principally of two paths.
First, there are highly vocal AI luminaires making individualized brazen predictions. Their headiness makes outsized media headlines. Those prophecies seem to be coalescing toward the year 2030 as a targeted date for AGI. A somewhat quieter path is the advent of periodic surveys or polls of AI experts. This wisdom of the crowd approach is a form of scientific consensus. As I discuss at the link here, the latest polls seem to suggest that AI experts generally believe that we will reach AGI by the year 2040.
Should you be swayed by the AI luminaries or more so by the AI experts and their scientific consensus?
Historically, the use of scientific consensus as a method of understanding scientific postures has been relatively popular and construed as the standard way of doing things. If you rely on an individual scientist, they might have their own quirky view of the matter. The beauty of consensus is that a majority or more of those in a given realm are putting their collective weight behind whatever position is being espoused.
The old adage is that two heads are better than one. In the case of scientific consensus, it might be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of heads that are better than one. For this discussion on the various pathways to AGI, I am going to proceed with the year 2040 as the consensus anticipated target date.
Besides the scientific consensus of AI experts, another newer and more expansive approach to gauging when AGI will be achieved is known as AGI convergence-of-evidence or AGI consilience, which I discuss at the link here.
As mentioned, in a previous posting I identified seven major pathways that AI is going to advance to become AGI (see the link here). The most often presumed path is the incremental progression trail. The AI industry tends to refer to this as the linear path. It is essentially slow and steady. Each of the other remaining major routes involves various twists and turns.
Here's my list of all seven major pathways getting us from contemporary AI to the treasured AGI:
You can apply those seven possible pathways to whatever AGI timeline that you want to come up with.
Let's undertake a handy divide-and-conquer approach to identify what must presumably happen on a year-by-year basis to get from current AI to AGI.
Here's how that goes.
We are living in 2025 and somehow are supposed to arrive at AGI by the year 2040. That's essentially 15 years of elapsed time. In the particular case of the linear path, the key assumption is that AI is advancing in a stepwise fashion each year. There aren't any sudden breakthroughs or miracles that perchance arise. It is steady work and requires earnestly keeping our nose to the grind and getting the job done in those fifteen years ahead.
The idea is to map out the next fifteen years and speculate what will happen with AI in each respective year.
This can be done in a forward-looking mode and also a backward-looking mode. The forward-looking entails thinking about the progress of AI on a year-by-year basis, starting now and culminating in arriving at AGI in 2040. The backward-looking mode involves starting with 2040 as the deadline for AGI and then working back from that achievement on a year-by-year basis to arrive at the year 2025 (matching AI presently). This combination of forward and backward envisioning is a typical hallmark of futurecasting.
Is this kind of a forecast of the future ironclad?
Nope.
If anyone could precisely lay out the next fifteen years of what will happen in AI, they probably would be as clairvoyant as Warren Buffett when it comes to predicting the stock market. Such a person could easily be awarded a Nobel Prize and ought to be one of the richest people ever.
All in all, this strawman that I show here is primarily meant to get the juices flowing on how we can be future forecasting the state of AI. It is a conjecture. It is speculative. But at least it has a reasonable basis and is not entirely arbitrary or totally artificial.
I went ahead and used the fifteen years of reaching AGI in 2040 as an illustrative example. It could be that 2050 is the date for AGI instead, and thus this journey will play out over 25 years. The timeline and mapping would then have 25 years to deal with rather than fifteen. If 2030 is going to be the AGI arrival year, the pathway would need to be markedly compressed.
I opted to identify AI technological advancements for each of the years and added some brief thoughts on the societal implications too. Here's why. AI ethics and AI law are bound to become increasingly vital and will to some degree foster AI advances and in other ways possibly dampen some AI advances, see my in-depth coverage of such tensions at the link here.
Here then is a strawman futures forecast year-by-year roadmap from 2025 to 2040 of a linear path getting us to AGI:
Year 2025: AI multi-modal models finally become robust and fully integrated into LLMs. Significant improvements in AI real-time reasoning, sensorimotor integration, and grounded language understanding occur. The use of AI in professional domains such as law, medicine, and the like rachet up. Regulatory frameworks remain sporadic and generally unadopted.
Year 2026: Agentic AI starts to blossom and become practical and widespread. AI systems with memory and planning capabilities achieve competence in open-ended tasks in simulation environments. Public interest in governing AI increases.
Year 2027: The use of AI large-scale world models spurs substantially improved AI capabilities. AI can now computationally improve from fewer examples via advancements in AI meta-learning. Some of these advances allow AI to be employed in white-collar jobs that have a mild displacement economically, but only to a minor degree.
Year 2028: AI agents have gained wide acceptance and are capable of executing multi-step tasks semi-autonomously in digital and physical domains, including robotics. AI becomes a key element as taught in schools and as used in education, co-teaching jointly with human teachers.
Year 2029: AI is advanced sufficiently to have a generalized understanding of physical causality and real-world constraints through embodied learning. Concerns about AI as a job displacer reach heightened attention.
Year 2030: Self-improving AI systems begin modifying their own code under controlled conditions, improving efficiency without human input. This is an important underpinning. Some claim that AGI is now just a year or two away, but this is premature, and ten more years will first take place.
Year 2031: Hybrid AI consisting of integrated cognitive architectures unifying symbolic reasoning, neural networks, and probabilistic models has become the new accepted approach to AI. Infighting among AI developers as to whether hybrid AI was the way to go has now evaporated. AI-based tutors fully surpass human teachers in personalization and subject mastery, putting human teachers at great job risk.
Year 2032: AI agents achieve human-level performance across most cognitive benchmarks, including abstraction, theory of mind (ToM), and cross-domain learning. This immensely exceeds prior versions of AI that did well on those metrics but not nearly to this degree. Industries begin to radically restructure and rethink their businesses with an AI-first mindset.
Year 2033: AI scalability alignment protocols improve in terms of human-AI values alignment. This opens the door to faster adoption of AI due to a belief that AI safety is getting stronger. Trust in AI grows. But so is societal dependence on AI.
Year 2034: AI interaction appears to be indistinguishable from human-to-human interaction, even as tested by those who are versed in tricking AI into revealing itself. The role of non-human intelligence and how AI stretches our understanding of philosophy, religion, and human psychology has become a high priority.
Year 2035: AI systems exhibit bona fide signs of self-reflection, not just routinized mimicry or parroting. Advances occur in having AI computationally learn from failure across domains and optimizing for long-term utility functions. Debates over some form of UBI (universal basic income) lead to various trials of the approach to aid human labor displacements due to AI.
Year 2036: AI advancement has led to fluid generalization across a wide swath of domains. Heated arguments take place about whether AGI is emerging, some say it is, and others insist that a scaling wall is about to be hit and that this is the best that AI will be. Nations begin to covet their AI and set up barriers to prevent other nations from stealing or copying the early AGI systems.
Year 2037: Advances in AI showcase human-like situational adaptability and innovation. New inventions and scientific discoveries are being led by AI. Questions arise about whether this pre-AGI has sufficient moral reasoning and human goal alignment.
Year 2038: AI systems now embody persistent identities, seemingly able to reflect on experiences across time. Experts believe we are on the cusp of AI reaching cognitive coherence akin to humans. Worldwide discourse on the legal personhood and rights of AI intensifies.
Year 2039: Some of the last barriers to acceptance of AI as nearing AGI are overcome when AI demonstrates creativity, emotional nuance, and abstract reasoning in diverse contexts. This was one of the last straws on the camel's back. Existential risks and utopian visions fully dominate public apprehensions.
Year 2040: General agreement occurs that AGI has now been attained, though it is still early days of AGI and some are not yet convinced that AGI is truly achieved. Society enters a transitional phase: post-scarcity economics, redefinition of human purpose, and consideration of co-evolution with AGI.
Mull over the strawman timeline and consider where you will be and what you will be doing during each of those fifteen years.
One viewpoint is that we are all along for the ride and there isn't much that anyone can individually do. I don't agree with that sentiment. Any of us can make a difference in how AI plays out and what the trajectory and impact of reaching AGI is going to be.
As per the famous words of Abraham Lincoln: 'The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.'