I really, really don't think modern AI capabilities and AGI are as dissimilar as airplanes and rockets. Neither do many AI researchers. You're obviously welcome to disagree, but you don't just get to declare their opinions invalid because you think they're out of their depth.
This is also true. You see all of these things like Hawking and Musk talking about the AI Apocalypse (when they aren't even experts in the field), and it gets people scared when, at this point, there's very little reason to be.
On the other hand, I don't actually know Hinton's opinion on these things, and he might agree with me (in which case, you absolutely should listen to him!). But instead the loudest voices are perhaps the most ridiculous.
That said, I do think that if I asked you to make a bet with me on when we would approach with even 50% confidence, your error bars would be on the order of a century.
