Another wrong place to look for AI
Authoritarian states like China are never going to develop an AI, because they couldn't control it.
Same for most other major Governments, corporations, and universities.
The two most likely scenarios for true AI emergence seem to, me at least, be the following:
Created by some enthusiast working on his own on 'something cool'.
Or, accidentally via increasingly complex interactions between programs, data sets, and hardware.
The second one would be the real problem, nowhere to pull the plug, because it arose naturally from everything. You'd have to try to shut down its environment, with it resisting*.
... and that's enough speculation from me for one day.
*The traits I'd expect in a practical AI are curiosity, an ability to learn and remember, and self awareness. I'd posit that self awareness implies either self preservation or suicide, and an AI that immediately terminates itself could hardly be called practical in evolutionary terms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
