There was a recent series of guidelines released by the US Government designed to both avoid living out a real-life version of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator while also promoting the development of AI in the U.S. economy. Raising the question: How far are we from having machines capable of outthinking us?

Moore’s Law says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every 18-24 months. The prediction was made in 1965, and it has proved to be remarkably accurate over the last 58 years. Intel’s 4004 integrated circuit, introduced in 1971 included a remarkable 2,300 transistors. Today, Apple’s M1 chip includes 114 billion transistors, and the price per transistor has dropped from roughly $1 to about one-billionth of $1. To put that in context, if the auto industry had advanced as rapidly, a Rolls Royce would get half a million miles per gallon, and it would be cheaper to throw it away than to park it.

At this pace the average computer chip will be 2x as smart by the middle of 2025, and 4x as smart compared to today by Christmas of 2027. And that doesn’t include the possibility that quantum computing will become mainstream within that time frame, radically improving the processing speed and power of our thinking devices.

Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari has memorably said that our computer industry is rapidly creating intelligence without awareness. Just as the internet gave us much faster and easier access to more and better information, AI is making it much faster and easier to scour the internet for the information we want. No one yet knows exactly what AI will do in the future, in part because it’s not easy to imagine all the possibilities of having a superior intelligence living inside your pocket.

It’s an understatement to say that this will be a transformational event in our daily lives, something we all (not just the government) should be paying close attention to.

*See Founder Sam G Huszczo, CFA, CFP’s interview with the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) in the top link below: