The Maes–Garreau law is the statement that "most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes–Garreau point", defined as "the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it".Kevin Kelly: The Maes–Garreau Point March 14, 2007 Specifically, it relates to predictions of a technological singularity or other radical future technologies.
It has been referred to as a "law of human nature",Michael Marshall, Five laws of human nature, New Scientist, 17 December 2009 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18301-five-laws-of-human-nature.html although Kelly's evidence is anecdotal.
Origin Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired magazine, created the law in 2007 after being influenced by Pattie Maes at MIT and Joel Garreau (author of Radical Evolution).
In 1993, Maes listed a number of her colleagues at MIT that had publicly predicted mind uploading (the replication of a human brain on a computer), and noted that the innovations were generally slated to occur approximately 70 years after the birth of the predictor. As quoted by her colleague Rodney Brooks:
Failed attempts to verify Maes-Garreau The Machine Intelligence Research Institute released a paper detailing a much larger set of 95 AI predictions extracted from a database of 257 AI predictions, which finds a broad array of estimates significantly before and after a predictor's estimated longevity, thus contradicting the law. MIRI states a stronger rule as being "Maes-Garreau": "the predictor expects AI to be developed at the exact end of their life."Armstrong, Stuart, and Kaj Sotala. 2012. "How We're Predicting AI — or Failing to." In Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams ed. Jan Romportl, Pavel Ircing, Eva Žáčková, Michal Polák, Radek Schuster, 52–75. Plzeň: University of West Bohemia.
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