I think what we might see is a kind of autonomous corporation that is nominally under the control of shareholders, a CEO or a board, but which makes decisions without very much or any human input, and which gains some amount of legal rights through corporate personhood.

It won't be a 'general ai', though. More like a set of loosely connected systems that operate 'in the best interests of the shareholders', however that's defined.

It's pretty much the end state of the trend of pushing decision making to algorithms to remove moral and legal culpability from individuals.

I'm hoping that eventually translates to the state.

Well, an interesting property of the brain is that any I/O relation happens within X milliseconds, which puts a limit on the depth of the network (if the speed of a neuron is limited). It would be nice to have some hard numbers on this.

general intelligence seems way over rated to me...

I have plenty of wants and desires that could take a whole army of idiot savants working 24/7 to fulfill.

Out of curiosity: how far away do you think we are?

I'll say... 5 - 7 years. This is all based on pure speculation, and being a little more than a ML hobbiest. One thing is for sure though - when we do reach that point, everything changes forever.

I'm immensely confused as to how such a number can be put on a discovery.

Then again.. I also don't understand how researchers come up with a yearly budget for making discoveries.

My number is based on raw-nothingness and just pure speculation on my part. I'm by no means an expert in any regard.

I would have said 30 years, and I thought I was the optimist :) Anyway I hope you're right and I'm wrong!

That's not a thing to hope for. We haven't solved the value alignment problem, so the longer until we have human or better-than-human AI, the better.

Theory - does empathy rise with intelligence?

There's no reason to think it does, and plenty of reason to think it shouldn't. We have a fairly good reason of why humans have empathy; it has to do with our evolution as a social species.

On the other hand, the longer it takes to find general AI, the more powerful hardware will be when it is found.

Compared to researchers in the field, even your prediction is very optimistic.

Can you provide references ? I'd like to know what researchers think about it.

There are a few sources at https://intelligence.org/all-publications/

Click on "FC Forecasting" near the top to limit the list to those about AI predictions, including:

- The Errors, Insights and Lessons of Famous AI Predictions - and What They Mean for the Future

- Predicting AGI: What Can We Say When We Know So Little?

- How We're Predicting AI - or Failing To