Predictions on the record
Explore Hans Moravec's AGI and superintelligence timeline: 5 sourced statements from Sep 3, 1977 to Jan 13, 2000. Compare what was said, when it was said, and any predicted arrival date.
This is a curated record, not a complete history or a scorecard. AGI and ASI labels group related language; the original wording and caveats remain below. How we document claims.
Prediction · AGI
Expected around 1987
If hardware projections held and software kept pace, machines thinking as well as humans could begin appearing in ten years.
Source summary · not a verbatim quotation.
The essay explicitly made the timing conditional on both hardware and software. It forecast an additional 15 years for human-equivalent computing to become as inexpensive as a pocket calculator.
Prediction · AGI
Expected 2030–2040
Robots combining world simulation and reasoning could gain most human abilities in the 2030–2040 period.
Source summary · not a verbatim quotation.
Moravec proposed generations of robots progressing from simple control to learning, simulation and reasoning. This was a staged research forecast, not a description of an existing universal robot.
Prediction · AGI
Expected around 2040
“By around 2040, there will be no job that people can do better than robots.”
An interview forecasting broadly capable robots after successive improvements in learning and reasoning.
Prediction · AGI
Expected around 2050
Robots would reach human-level capabilities by the middle of the next century, in software as well as processing power.
Source summary · not a verbatim quotation.
Moravec described four generations of robots, with early commercial success funding increasingly sophisticated world models and reasoning. The interview also describes fourth-generation machines roughly forty or fifty years away.
Prediction · AGI
Expected around 2040
Robots could reach human-level intelligence around 2040.
Source summary · not a verbatim quotation.
An incremental robotics forecast.