"There are now thousands of AI scientists around the world (concentrated largely in the English-speaking countries) who feel that humanity will be able to build massively intelligent machines this century that will be hugely smarter than human beings."

I'm someone skeptical about this claim, certainly it's a while since I worked in AI research, but from what I recall after the AI Winter researchers were generally pretty guarded about making claims for there being any clear route to building general intelligences.