I would say I agree more with Christiano.
By 2026:
At least 50% of programming work that would have been done by a human programmer in 2019 will be done by systems like Codex or Co-Pilot.
Humaniod robotic maids, butlers and companions will be for sale in some form, although they will be limited and underwhelming, and few people will have them in their homes.
Self driving will finally be practical and applied widely. In the USA, between 10 and 70% of automobile trips will be autonomous or in self driving mode. Humans will not be banned from driving anywhere in the world, that’s more of a 2030s+ thing.
AI will beat human grandmasters at nearly every video game or formal game. There might be 1-5 games which AI still struggles with, and they will be notable exceptions. Or there might be 0 such games. RL systems can learn most games from pixels in less than a GPU-day (using 2026-era GPUs, consuming less than 1000 watts and costing less than $4,000 USD2019 adjusted for inflation.) RL research will be focused on beating humans in sports and physical games like soccer, basketball, golf, etc.
Chatbots will regularly pass Turing tests, although it will remain controversial whether that means anything. Publicly available chatbots will be about as good as GPT-3 in grammar and competence, but unlike GPT-3 they will have consistent personalities and memory over time—i.e., the limitations of the 2048 token window will be overcome somehow. Good chatbots will be available to the public, and will be ubiquitous in customer service, but whether they are popular as companions or personal assistants will depend on public acceptance. This is the same problem faced by AR: the tech will definitely be there, but the public might not be interested and might be somewhat hostile.
I personally am not sure if GWP growth will be significantly above historical baselines. I think AI will have progressed significantly, but we also know that, even going back to the 90s, information technology has made an underwhelming impact on productivity. The world economy is such a weird mess right now for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, so it’s hard to make predictions.
There won’t be significant unemployment due to technology (yet), but some careers will be significantly altered, including drivers and programmers.
I consider these predictions to be pretty conservative. I would not be surprised to be surprised by AI progress, but I would be very disappointed if we didn’t meet 5⁄7 of my predictions.
It seems to me that this task has an unclear goal. Imagine I linked you a github repo and said “this is a 100% accurate and working simulation of the worm.” How would you verify that? If we had a WBE of Ray Kurzweil, we could at least say “this emulated brain does/doesn’t produce speech that resembles Kurzweil’s speech.” What can you say about the emulated worm? Does it wiggle in some recognizable way? Does it move towards the scent of food?