Letsee here. The Kurzweil model is suggesting that we can get to smart machines by way of brute force. Not necessarily the only way, but one that's hard to argue against as it's just extending today's neural net simulators to faster hardware. Using the open source NEST model, a supercomputer in Japan, the K computer, simulated a second's worth of "brain" activity in 40 minutes. That was a network 1% the size of human brain. So you'd need at least 240,000 times the CPU power to do this at 100% in realtime. Except maybe a few more zeros, since growing a neural network isn't linear, even if you're able to split off subsection for different work, as the brain seems to do. Sometimes.

So 2029 is 15 years away. If we take the erroneous but popular idea that Moore's Law is both a real law and directly about CPU performance (neither of which is true), that's a doubling of performance every 18 months. So by 2029, we only have computers 1024x faster than today's. But by 2045, computers will be a million times faster, at least based on these bad assumptions. So maybe we have a supercomputer than can run a human brain sized neural net in realtime. That get us Skynet by brute force, but not Commander Data. That's another 20 years off.

Of course, I started low... anyone ran run NEST. But it's by far not the most aggressive model. IBM built a more efficient model, modeling a whole artificial brain the complexity of the human brain on a Blue Gene/Sequoia Q supercomputer. It ran 1053x slower than realtime.... which suggests a realtime version might be possible around 2029. IBM actually say it might be as early as 2023, as they're building chips that implement their "neurosynaptic cores" in hardware. The model has over 2 billion neurosynaptic cores, and it's very intentionally designed to be a brain, though not a strict emulation of a human brain. There are dozens of projects around the world doing similar things. One team in Europe has a realtime honeybee scale brain running, and hopes to have a rat scale brain done this year. Another team has a non-realtime model similar to a cat's brain... can hatz cheezeburger?

So it sure looks possible to have Skynet by 2029. Self-contained thinking mobile machines, probably not for a decade or two beyond. And that's assuming no technological roadblocks in scaling our hardware. But also no huge leap away from the brute force approach. And no hardware design help from IBM's realtime brain of 2023. But of course, it won't even graduate college before 2030, assuming a few upgrades along the way. And a few years after that, we may not even understand the improved brain it's getting us to build for it...

Yes and no. I studied this in college, five courses covering AI and related things, both from the CS and the Psychological perspective.

Computer Engineering has typically made AIs in a practical way: we're trying to build a machine that exhibits intelligent behavior. We don't begin to mean that it thinks, but rather, that it's capable of analyzing data and making decisions that we, as the real thinkers, judge to be the intelligent decision. That can be an expert system that passes a Turing Test or beats the Jeopardy champion, it could be a chess player that beats grandmasters, or a "smart" combine that can robo-harvest your fields using less fuel that a human would. No one's claiming any thinking here, but we all agree that the behavior is emulating intelligent human behavior.

In the Cognitive Psychology department, they're far more interested in modeling what the brain is actually doing. Using the open source NEST model, supercomputers have already run a brain of about 1% the capacity of the human brain. That's a brute force model, but still, way more powerful than an insect, no "magic spark" needed. And none ever will be. Life isn't magic.

They still need a off switch. In most every scifi doomsday story, we seem to decide that off switches or plugs are unnecessary, maybe just a couple of years before the machines go sentient and run around killing everyone. It's probably even easier with the robots. The first several generations of thinking machines won't fit in a robot. So they'll be robotic drones, much like today's robotic drones, just driven by thinking machines. Over radio. Radio that we already know how to jam, even if we have at some point lost the ability to access said drones through the RF link.