Some people are already nervous about artificial intelligence – what it means for our jobs, the art we consume (and produce), and a whole host of other issues.

So, I’m not sure the prediction that superintelligence is nipping at its heels.

Computer scientist Ben Goertzel was closing out his talk at this year’s Beneficial AGI Summit in Panama when he dropped the bomb that he believes artificial intelligence with human (or better) intelligence could be here as soon as 2027.

He believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) could evolve rapidly  into artificial superintelligence. He then defined what exactly that means to him.

“No one has created human-level artificial general intelligence yet; nobody has a solid knowledge of when we’re going to get there. I mean, there are known unknowns and probably unknown unknowns. On the other hand, to me it seems quite plausible we could get to human-level AGI within, let’s say, the next three to eight years.”

Others who are trying to predict the same turn of events put it at least a little further in the future, however.

Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg thinks there’s only a 50/50 chance that AGI will be invented by 2028.

Ex-Google employee and AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton predicts that it’s anywhere from five to twenty-five years away, though he admits he doesn’t have much confidence in his estimate.

Goertzel refers to the moment when AI reachers human-level intelligence as the “singularity.”

For what it’s worth, he doesn’t think LLM (large language models like OpenAI) are going to lead to AGI on their own.

“My own view is once you get to human-level AGI, within a few years you could get a radically superhuman AGI – unless the AGI threatens to throttle its own development out of its own conservatism. I think once an AGI can introspect its own mind, then it can do engineering and science at a human or superhuman level.”

Even a superhuman AI wouldn’t have a “mind” the way a human being does, and it won’t exist in a vacuum.

That said, based on how quickly AI has has developed over the past decade, it’s not crazy to think it could continue down that path – or move even faster.

We’ll have to wait to find out.

And hopefully it won’t be the end of us all.

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