Hans Moravec has been interviewed
First Posted: 2026.09.05, Revision History, Author: Tom Brown
In 1988 Hans Moravec made the ultimate extrapolation by predicting human-level AI by 2028. He has just come out of multi-decade seclusion from public life to give an interview.
Ever since reading Moravec's 1988 book Mind Children and seeing the progress made by LLMs, I've been wondering what he thought about current developments. He hadn't given a major public interview in 25 years. I assumed he had been ill, as had others.
Then in April 2026 Dan Kagan-Kans snaffled an interview, published in July in New York Magazine. It's a great summary of Moravec's thought, and a moving portrait of someone facing the end of their life with equanimity.
Moravec looked at the trend of how the computing power you could get for a thousand dollars was doubling every two years, and then extrapolated out to the 10 trillion operations per second (teraops) you would need for a human-like mind. He assumed scaling is enough. In 1988 he put the date of human-like intelligence at 40 years in the future, and then went on to explore the consequences. His later work imagined "mind fire" spreading into the universe, turning matter into computation. Arthur C. Clarke described it as "the most awesome work of controlled imagination I have ever encountered".
Today Moravec sees that we're "on track, more or less".
Of course you can quibble: Moravec thought the AI would be embodied, he thought it would be directly programmed rather than evolved, he thought we would be uploading our minds, and his prediction assumed we would have human-like AI in a supercomputer by 2010 already. For my money, Stanislaw Lem got more of the texture of AI right (how it would be evolved, how it would feel quite alien to us). Lem and Moravec were united in their disdain for John Searle's Chinese Room, an argument claiming that machines cannot have true understanding.
For all the quibbles, you still have to admire Moravec's insight, and the predictive power of cold hard extrapolation.
To end, here's a quotation from Mind Children where he imagines our impatience with our wetware: "Long life loses much of its point if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at our ultra-intelligent machines as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby-talk that we can understand".