There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence—the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists was 2040

This is probably a mistake in the article, because the 2040 median is most likely coming from this survey (www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf), and specifically coming from when AI experts were asked what year they could be 50% sure of human level AI coming about. For comparison, the 90% interval was 2075, which paints a very different picture.

Edit: the author has fixed the phrasing on that line