When Will The First Machine Become Superintelligent?

How long until the first machine reaches superintelligence? Not shockingly, opinions vary wildly, and this is a heated debate among scientists and thinkers. Those people subscribe to the belief that this is happening soon -- that exponential growth is at work and machine learning, though only slowly creeping up on us now, will blow right past us within the next few decades. Others, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, research psychologist Gary Marcus, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis, and tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, believe that thinkers like Kurzweil are vastly underestimating the magnitude of the challenge [and the transition will actually take much more time] ... The Kurzweil camp would counter that the only underestimating that's happening is the underappreciation of exponential growth, and they'd compare the doubters to those who looked at the slow-growing seedling of the internet in 1985 and argued that there was no way it would amount to anything impactful in the near future. The doubters might argue back that the progress needed to make advancements in intelligence also grows exponentially harder with each subsequent step, which will cancel out the typical exponential nature of technological progress.