Krostas

Have you ever been back to Germany, the Ruhrgebiet in particular?
If so, what are your thoughts on the changes that have happened since? (political, economical, society in general)

Greetings from a neighbouring city of Herne.

As you have mentioned that you don't possess any programming experience yourself, how confident are you that the claim "5 to 20 years to AI sentience" is not just scientists pulling a journalist's strings to give their field of research a place in the spotlight? I've not only read a lot about AI, but studied the field for a few semesters at university, planning to follow up with some more:

The one thing that seems to be sure is that neither the "singularity" nor "sentience" will be coming any time soon. AIs "smarter" than humans is a thing of the past already (Deep Blue, Alpha Go) - very unlikely and not even on the horizon of AI research is a system that will function remotely close to a human in most ways (motoric functions, vision, memory, speech, creativity, etc.). As of now, every single of these tasks would need a single, highly specialized AI to mimic it. Other layers of neural networks would be needed to organize these and to switch between them when appropriate.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that most AIs either need a very rigid set of rules in which they function (Alpha Go would get smashed at Backgammon by a toddler), are very dependant on the training data they receive even to the extent of some stimuli being able to "hack" the system (can you imagine confusing a chair for a table just because a chicken is standing on the other side of the room?) or are still magnitudes away from coming on par with human performance.

If you ask high profile roboticists, for example those from Boston Dynamics, they'd tell you that all those fancy videos they are showing are not the norm but very lucky and rare attempts. Sure, they're slowly pushing the boundary and it's astounding to see what they can achieve. But they're far from doing it reliably.