John von Neumann was in favor of a preventive nuclear attack against Russia. Do you think that if von Neumann was still around and thought that Google would within 5-10 years launch a doomsday device he would refrain from using violence if he thought that only violence could stop them? I believe that if the U.S. administration was highly confident that e.g. some Chinese lab was going to start an intelligence explosion by tomorrow, they would consider nuking it.
There is some truth to that, especially how crazy von Neumann was. But I'm not sure if anyone would be launching pre-emtive nuclear attack on other country because of AGI research. I mean this countries already have nukes, pretty solid doomsday weapon so I dont think that adding another superweapon to its arsenal will change situation. Whether you are blown to bits by chinese nuke or turn into paperclips by chinese-built AGI doesn't make much difference.
Elon Musk submitted a comment to edge.org a day or so ago, on this article. It was later removed.
Now Elon has been making noises about AI safety lately in general, including for example mentioning Bostrom's Superintelligence on twitter. But this is the first time that I know of that he's come up with his own predictions of the timeframes involved, and I think his are rather quite soon compared to most.
We can compare this to MIRI's post in May this year, When Will AI Be Created, which illustrates that it seems reasonable to think of AI as being further away, but also that there is a lot of uncertainty on the issue.
Of course, "something seriously dangerous" might not refer to full blown superintelligent uFAI - there's plenty of space for disasters of magnitude in between the range of the 2010 flash crash and clippy turning the universe into paperclips to occur.
In any case, it's true that Musk has more "direct exposure" to those on the frontier of AGI research than your average person, and it's also true that he has an audience, so I think there is some interest to be found in his comments here.