Over half of Americans think that an AGI could be invented in the next four years

The next four years promise to be interesting ones: from geopolitics to medicine, climate change to autonomous vehicles, history certainly seems to be on fast mode. One of the most significant events that could happen is the creation of an AI that passes a crucial threshold: with roughly the same level of intelligence as the average human.

For the last few months, leaders of AI labs based out of San Fransisco have been saying that AGI - a full Artificial General Intelligence - is no longer a matter of decades, but could be here within years.

Is this just hype? In a new nationally representative poll of Americans, we found a majority of them agreed.

What is more, this expectation that AGI could arrive was strikingly non partisan. While concerns over climate change are significantly weighted towards Democrat supporters, concerns about AGI cross both.

Another way to look at this is to ask which of the two - climate change or AI - will have a bigger impact in the next four years. For the last decade, climate change has often been cited as the single most significant non economic issue the world faces.

Here, we do see the return of a partisan divide, but overall a clear pattern across every age group over 25: more people think that AI will have a bigger impact than climate change in the coming years.