And does being unscientific make a thing wrong? Saying "we won't have strong AI in our lifetimes" is an equally strong claim that is also unscientific. You can't say "we can't know" because what does that even mean? That the outcome is 50/50? That's still pretty decent odds for something so significant!

As a professional scientist in AI and deep learning, I see futurists making wild predictions about AI that I wouldn't see anyone serious in the field coming remotely close to making. I don't know how it is with other futurism fields like genetics, space travel and energy generation, but I expect that it's a similar situation.

All I'm trying to say is, let's please keep a cool head and a wholly skeptical approach about all this.

But the survey I posted that started this discussion was a survey of experts in AI.

Note that no one is claiming that skynet will appear any day now. Just that we will very likely have human-level AI in a few decades. I don't think that's a terribly wild or speculative claim.

also please note I didn't say "we won't have strong AI in our lifetimes". Let's work on the actual developments specific of science instead of what we dream it to be. We want people to think about deep learning as a sophisticated pattern analysis algorithm instead of thinking that Skynet is going to start a coup any day now.