>>10828994Shane Legg is co-founder of DeepMind Technologies (wiki), an AI startup that was bought for Google in 2014 for about $500 million. He earned his PhD at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Switzerland and also worked at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London. His dissertation Machine Superintelligence concludes:
If there is ever to be something approaching absolute power, a superintelligent machine would come close. By definition, it would be capable of achieving a vast range of goals in a wide range of environments. If we carefully prepare for this possibility in advance, not only might we avert disaster, we might bring about an age of prosperity unlike anything seen before.
In a later interview, he states:
AI is now where the internet was in 1988. Demand for machine learning skills is quite strong in specialist applications (search companies like Google, hedge funds and bio-informatics) and is growing every year. I expect this to become noticeable in the mainstream around the middle of the next decade. I expect a boom in AI around 2020 followed by a decade of rapid progress, possibly after a market correction. Human level AI will be passed in the mid 2020’s, though many people won’t accept that this has happened. After this point the risks associated with advanced AI will start to become practically important…I don’t know about a “singularity”, but I do expect things to get really crazy at some point after human level AGI has been created. That is, some time from 2025 to 2040.
