Agree. Basically all current progress in "AI" should really just be called statistics and I think there would be much less confusion. If you say statistics meets Big Data and faster computers then you basically have all current progress. Real "AI" i.e. thinking machines which are behaviourally intelligent without resorting to cheap tricks has made very limited progress.
We might be able to fool ourselves into thinking a machine can think. For example, given a naive Bayes classifier for all X situations there is a probability that a real person responds with Y so therefore the machine responds with Y and then a human observing this system perceives the system to "be intelligent". But for me this is just statistics and nothing more, there is no abstract thought or intelligence going on within that machine system - at least as it relates to all other living creatures on the planet.
As long as we are useful we get to live to perform this duty. When no longer we'll become sausage.
Even if he was talking about the Singularity, I am skeptical of someone talking about a far-off, theoretical doom to discourage investment in competing existing technologies.
"Most notably, safety spans a wide range of concerns from the fears of sci-fi style sentience to the more near-term questions such as validating the performance of self-driving cars."
I feel like the term "Singularity" is used in too many ways by too many different people to be useful unless you define how you're using it but Brin seems worried about AGI.
That being said I'm very far removed from A.I. research so I don't really know what I'm talking about.
If however we're talking about the Singularity where artificial human-level intelligence is produced then I think this will be a more important discovery than fire or agriculture in the history of humankind. That means that we'll have produced machines that are as good or even probably better than humans at basically anything, from making coffee to driving a truck to being a bank teller to being a software developer. If we reach this point where humanity is basically obsolete then what happens?
I don't think the Singularity is as close as some people make it to be, I know AI is super hype these days but we've had AI winters in the past and they could happen again. I do believe that it's undoubtedly going to happen sooner or later however, be it in a year, a decade or a century. When it happens what are we going to do? Will it be the beginning of a heavenly post-scarcity world where super-intelligent machines take care of all our needs, freeing us to write poetry and do some soul searching or will it create an incredible amount of instability as all of humanity suddenly realize that whatever they want to do they can ask a machine to do for them and better?