Hans Moravec’s 1988 AI forecast is back in focus as he reflects on humanity’s future
binarybits · x · 2026-07-28
This post links to a long New York profile of Hans Moravec, the roboticist who predicted human-level AI decades ago and is now reflecting on what comes next.
- Moravec’s 1988 argument estimated the brain’s computational capacity and extrapolated Moore’s law to predict human-level AI around 2028.
- The article revisits how he reasoned from retinal and brain computation to a rough target of 10 trillion operations per second.
- The piece frames him as both an early prophet of AI progress and someone now thinking about the fate of humanity in a world where that prediction may arrive.
- The quoted line in the post captures the article’s tone: intelligence is at once more replicable and more mysterious than it first appears.
Related event: Hans Moravec's 1988 AGI Prediction Revisited(2 posts)→
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