I mean, if you kept on making it marginally cooler and cooler, it'd go to "oh, shit" one day after a sequence of "ooh, cools" and I don't know how long that sequence is.

This means we should feel pretty safe, since AI does not appear to be making even incremental progress.

Really, it's hard for anyone who is well-versed in the "state of the art" of AI to feel any kind of alarm about the possibility of an imminent FOOM. Take a look at this paper. Skim through the intro, note the long and complicated reinforcement learning algorithm, and check out the empirical results section. The test domain involves a monkey in a 5x5 playroom. There are some fun little complications, like a light switch and a bell. Note that these guys are top-class (Andrew Barto basically invented RL), and the paper was published at one of the top-tier machine learning conferences (NIPS), in 2005.

Call me a denier, but I just don't think the monkey is going to bust out of his playroom and take over the world. At least, not anytime soon.