It's a good paper overall, and I'm glad to see it's been published - especially the Maes-Garreau material! (I wonder what Kevin Kelly made of our results? His reaction would've been neat to mention.)

But reading it all in one place, I think one part seems pretty weak: the criticizing of the 'expert' predictions. It seems to me like there ought to be more rigorous forms of assessment, and I wonder about possible explanations for the clumping at 20+ years: the full median-estimate graph seems to show a consistent expert trend post-1970s to put AI at x-2050 (I can't read the dates because the graphs are so illegible, what the heck?) and also many recent predictions. Perhaps there really is a forming expert consensus and the clump is due to the topic gaining a great deal of attention recently, and then the non-expert predictions are just taking their cue from the experts (as one would hope!)

It's a good paper overall, and I'm glad to see it's been published - especially the Maes-Garreau material! (I wonder what Kevin Kelly made of our results? His reaction would've been neat to mention.)

But reading it all in one place, I think one part seems pretty weak: the criticizing of the 'expert' predictions. It seems to me like there ought to be more rigorous forms of assessment, and I wonder about possible explanations for the clumping at 20+ years: the full median-estimate graph seems to show a consistent expert trend post-1970s to put AI at x-2050 (I can't read the dates because the graphs are so illegible, what the heck?) and also many recent predictions. Perhaps there really is a forming expert consensus and the clump is due to the topic gaining a great deal of attention recently, and then the non-expert predictions are just taking their cue from the experts (as one would hope!)