It took 17 years to go from perceptrons to back propagation...

... therefore I have moldy Jell-O in my skull for saying we won't go from manually debugging buffer overruns to superintelligent AI within 30 years...

I think EY is failing to take into account the exponential growth of AI researchers, their access to information, their ability to communicate, and the computation and algorithmic power they have at their disposal today.

I don't think the solution to a similar problem would take 17 years today.

Of course, a superintelligent AI is a harder problem than back propagation, and I doubt that it's comparable problem anyway. I don't expect some equation tweaking a singular known algorithm to do the trick. I suspect it's more of a systems integration problem. Brains are complex systems of functional units which have evolved organically over time.