As I will expand upon later, this contrast makes no sense. We are not going to have machines outperforming humans on every task in 2047 and then only fully automating human occupations in 2116. Not in any meaningful sense.
Maybe people are interpreting “task” as “bounded, self-contained task”, and so they’re saying that machines will be able to outperform humans on every “task” but not on the parts of their jobs that are not “tasks”.
The exact wording of the question was
Say we have ‘high-level machine intelligence’ when unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers. Ignore aspects of tasks for which being a human is intrinsically advantageous, e.g. being accepted as a jury member.
It does not appear that the survey had any specific guidance on how to interpret the word “task”, so it wouldn’t surprise me that much if people consider their job to be composed of both things that are tasks and also things that are not tasks, and that the things that are not tasks will take longer to automate.
Maybe people are interpreting “task” as “bounded, self-contained task”, and so they’re saying that machines will be able to outperform humans on every “task” but not on the parts of their jobs that are not “tasks”.
The exact wording of the question was
It does not appear that the survey had any specific guidance on how to interpret the word “task”, so it wouldn’t surprise me that much if people consider their job to be composed of both things that are tasks and also things that are not tasks, and that the things that are not tasks will take longer to automate.