Predicting where AI is going in 2020

This is false: Tesla's "autopilot" isn't a control-loop, much less a certified control-loop. What Tesla calls "autopilot" is actually a "driving assistant". It is not in charge of controlling the car, but it is allowed to assist the driver to control the car.

This is a subtle but very important difference, since this is the reason that Tesla tells its owners to always keep the hands on the steering wheel, and Tesla cars are required to disable their "driving assistant" in countries like Germany if the driver hands leave the steering wheel. It is also the reason that Tesla is not liable if a car with "autopilot" kills somebody, because the "autopilot" isn't technically driving the car, the driver is.

The word "autopilot" comes from the aerospace industry, where pilots are not required to keep their hand on the controls or pay attention when the "autopilot" is on, and the manufacturer is liable if the "autopilot" screws up (e.g. see Boing). Tesla's usage of the word "autopilot" to refer to driving assistants is misleading and dangerous.

A true car "autopilot" is what people call "Level 5" in the autonomous driving community. Elon Musk promised to ship 10.000 self-driving Level 5 Tesla taxis in 2019, and now mid 2020. We'll see about that.Elon Musk has been saying that Level 5 will happen next year for the last 10 years, so at least when it comes to autonomous driving, their predictions have been consistently wrong.

Most CEOs who adventure to predict when Level 5 will happen say something like "not before 2030". And Waymo's goal is to achieve """Level 5""" in a very small restricted area of Phoenix downtown for some restricted weather conditions some time between 2020-2030, but it is unclear what the road after achieving it would be for certification, and the road from there to actual, real, Level 5 is still unclear at this point.

The baby would do multi-modal learning - learning the associated sound (name) with an image (object).

I don't think the parent and baby lack a shared context. They are both agents in the same environment, who often interact and cooperate to achieve goals and maximise rewards. The baby understands the world much earlier than can speak, the context is there.

* Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the last problem in computer science, so it should be at least somewhat alarming that it's being funded by internet companies, wall street and the military instead of, say, universities/nonprofits/nonmilitary branches of the government.

* Machine learning is conceptually simple enough that most software developers could work on it (my feeling is that the final formula for consciousness will fit on a napkin), but they never will, because of endlessly having to reinvent the wheel to make rent - eventually missing the boat and getting automated out of a job.

* AI and robot labor will create unemployment and underemployment chaos if we don't implement universal basic income (UBI) or at the very least, reform the tax system so that automation provides for the public good instead of the lion's share of the profit going to a handful of wealthy financiers.

* Children aren't usually exposed to financial responsibility until around the age of 15 or so, so training machine learning for financial use is likely to result in at least some degree of sociopathy, wealth inequality and further entrenchment of the status quo (what we would consider misaligned ethics).

* Humans may not react well when it's discovered that self-awareness is emotion, and that as computers approach sentience they begin to act more like humans trapped in boxes, and that all of this is happening before the world can even provide justice and equality for the "other" (women, minorities, immigrants, oppressed creeds, intersexed people, the impoverished, etc etc etc).

My prediction for 2020: nothing. But for 2025: an optimal game-winning strategy is taught in universities. By 2030: the optimal game-winning strategy is combined with experience from quantum computing to create an optimal search space strategy using exponentially fewer resources than anything today (forming the first limited AGI). By 2035: AGI is found to require some number of execution cycles to evolve, perhaps costing $1 trillion. By 2040: cost to evolve AGI drops to $10 billion and most governments and wealthy financiers own what we would consider a sentient agent. By 2045: AGI is everywhere and humanity is addicted to having any question answered by the AGI oracle so progress in human-machine merging, immortality and all other problems are predicted to be solved within 5 years. By 2050: all human problems have either been enumerated or solved and attention turns to nonhuman motives that can't be predicted (the singularity).