The Banality of Artificial Intelligence

There are two main debates when it comes to artificial intelligence, by which I mean self-aware thinking machines with a general intelligence equal to or greater than that of humans. The first is when / whether it's coming. The second is what it will mean for humanity when it gets here. The vast majority of smart people who know anything about the topic seem to agree that it is coming, albeit with an ETA ranging anywhere from the 2020s to a few thousand years from now. I'm not a smart enough to weigh in on that. But if we postulate that it's coming eventually, that heralds in the second and far more interesting question of what happens next.