In 2017, researchers specialising in artificial intelligence were asked to do a risky exercise: say when AI would overtake humans in various tasks.
They gave dates. It is now 2026. We can check.
The predictions, against reality
| The task | Predicted for | In 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Translating languages | 2024 | ✅ Done |
| Writing a high-school essay | 2026 | ✅ Done, and ahead of schedule |
| Driving a lorry | 2027 | 🟡 Partly |
| Working in a shop | 2031 | ❌ A long way off |
| Writing a bestseller | 2049 | ❌ No |
| Operating as a surgeon | 2053 | ❌ No |
At first glance, not bad. The first two were spot on, even early. Driverless cars are already on the roads in a few cities, even if we are a long way from every lorry on every road.
But look closely at the table. There is a dividing line.
What they had not seen
Everything done with words arrived sooner than expected. The essay was expected in 2026: the first systems capable of writing a decent one arrived in 2023.
Everything done with hands is running late. Tidying a shelf, handling a fragile object, moving around in an unpredictable place: we are still a long way off.
Researchers thought that writing was hard and moving was easy. It was the other way round.
To learn to write, an AI can read billions of texts: the whole internet is there, free, already written. To learn to fold a t-shirt, there is no giant library of "ways to fold a t-shirt". The robot has to try, fail, start again, with a real body in the real world. Words can be copied endlessly. Gestures cannot. That is why office tasks flipped before manual tasks, the opposite of what everyone imagined.
The lesson for today's predictions
Those researchers were not bad. They were even among the best. Their mistake was not that they had miscalculated: it was that they imagined AI would advance everywhere at the same speed.
Today we hear an enormous number of predictions: such-and-such a job will disappear in such-and-such a year, such-and-such a capability will arrive by such-and-such a date. This picture invites one simple thing: asking whether the task in question is done with words, or with a body.
If it is with words, expect it to go faster than planned. If it is with hands, in an unpredictable place, expect it to take far longer than you are being told.
And bear in mind that in 2017, the world's best experts got the two the wrong way round. We are also devoting an article this afternoon to the question that follows from it: why household robots still do not exist.
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