SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Assuming we agree that there is a potential for an AI to become a Singularity how far do you think we are form it happening?

Bear in mind as I said in the other post I am not sure that NNs will be a candidate for the Singularity. That said one cannot ignore the recent explosion in potential seen with NNs. To name a few Watson, Deep Learning, Google’s self-driving car (though there are other things at work beyond NNs in this), and many other advances in machine learning have all pushed the field far ahead of what it was just two years ago. Perhaps the singularity will use a hybrid system that relies on NNs for some part of its processing function. It may even use several as slave processes to its primary function.

So based on the discussions from the first post I am interested to know your thought as to when the Singularity might happen.

I will also be posting this discussion in my blog so those that feel so inclined may also post their comments there as well. I will in turn post any comments that are not posted here, so as to contribute to the discussion.