“Things are going to change dramatically in the near future,” promises computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber, who says we’re just a few years from AI as smart as capuchin monkeys and several decades from autonomous robot factories in space. Neither one is theoretically impossible at some point, but, boy, technologists and futurists are awfully aggressive when it comes to time frames. 

Schmidhuber made these and other prognostications at a Wired conference, stressing that while machines will eventually make humans redundant in the universe, we’ll get lots of cool tech stuff before our extinction. Oh, good.

An excerpt:

Jürgen Schmidhuber is painting an image of the future of our Universe. And it’s plain to see, we are neither a real part of it, nor is it our Universe at all.

“In 2050 there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt,” he tells the audience at WIRED2016. “A few million years later, AI will colonise the galaxy. Humans are not going to play a big role there, but that’s ok. We should be proud of being part of a grand process that transcends humankind more than the industrial revolution. It is comparable to the invention of life itself, and I am privileged to live this moment and witness the beginnings of this.”

The pioneer in deep learning neural networks should know. His work – including 333 peer-reviewed papers – has formed the foundations of many of the AI systems we see embedded in smartphones today, including Google’s voice recognition and Google Translate – “each of you has a little piece of us in your pocket,” he said.•