Not necessarily. If it takes us 15 years to kludge something together that's twice as smart as a single human, I don't think it'll be capable of an intelligence explosion on any sort of time scale that could outmaneuver us. Even if the human-level AI can make something better in a tenth the time, we still have more than a year to react before even worrying about superhuman AI, never mind the sort of AI that's so far superhuman that it actually poses a threat to the established order. An AI explosion will have to happen in hardware, and hardware can't explode in capability so fast that it outstrips the ability of humans to notice it's happening.
One machine that's about as smart as a human and takes millions of dollars worth of hardware to produce is not high stakes. It'll bugger up the legal system something fierce as we try to figure out what to do about it, but it's lower stakes than any of a hundred ordinary problems of politics. It requires an AI that is significantly smarter than a human, and that has the capability of upgrading itself quickly, to pose a threat that we can't easily handle. I suspect at least 4.9 of that 5% is similar low-risk AI. Just because the laws of physics allow for something doesn't mean we're on the cusp of doing it in the real world.
You substantially overrate the legal system's concern with simple sentient rights and basic dignity. The legal system will have no problem determining what to do with such a machine. It will be the property of whoever happens to own it under the same rules as any other computer hardware and software.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that's the right answer (for more than one definition of right) but it is the answer the legal system will give.
The Register talks to Google's Alfred Spector:
Google's approach toward artificial intelligence embodies a new way of designing and running complex systems. Rather than create a monolithic entity with its own modules for reasoning about certain inputs and developing hypotheses that let it bootstrap its own intelligence into higher and higher abstractions away from base inputs, as other AI researchers did through much of the 60s and 70s, Google has instead taken a modular approach.
"We have the knowledge graph, [the] ability to parse natural language, neural network tech [and] enormous opportunities to gain feedback from users," Spector said in an earlier speech at Google IO. "If we combine all these things together with humans in the loop continually providing feedback our systems become ... intelligent."
Spector calls this his "combination hypothesis", and though Google is not there yet – SkyNet does not exist – you can see the first green buds of systems that have the appearance of independent intelligence via some of the company's user-predictive technologies such as Google Now, the new Maps and, of course, the way it filters search results according to individual identity.
(Emphasis mine.) I don't have a transcript, but there are videos online. Spector is clearly smart, and apparently he expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does. And he has all the resources and financing he wants, probably 3-4 orders of magnitude over MIRI's. His approach, if workable, also appears safe: it requires human feedback in the loop. What do you guys think?