We are too far away from it
Talking about AI is something the same as talking about interstellar travels. Is it good or bad? Doesn't matter! Whatever it is, not only don't we have a working starship, we have no even the fundamental physics needed to build one.
The same is with AI. Any AI we could imagine now will be some kind of computer. However, any device we can think now as a computer, regardless of its processing speed and memory size, will inevitably be an equivalent of Turing Machine -- the so called Church's Thesis.
But Turing Machine, a mathematical construct invented specifically to analyze any computational processes, proved to have some fundamental limitations. For instance, there cannot be a program that can create other programs, even for some quite narrow classes of tasks. We humans somehow do it... But the main limitation of any computer system (a Turing Machine, that is) is that it cannot create information by its own. A computer is always just a transformer of information. Yes, its capabilities can be extended indefinitely by adding new programs. But it cannot create those programs by itself. Human programmers are needed for that.
Being a programmer by myself, it always strikes me what meticulous efforts are need to teach (i.e. program) a computer to do quite simple things. The whole new specialized computer languages pop up all the time to do precisely that in particular fields.
It is only humans, who create information! But how can we do that? Maybe our brain listens to the cosmos, catches the information emanated from it in the form of entropy.... Anyway, we don't even have a physical theory about that (the same as with interstellar travels).
In the end, I think, in spite of all this anti-AI buzz raised by various celebrities, currently we are actually far away from the creation of a truly sentient being, and since we don't even understand what it is, all those fears are essentially baseless.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
