Machines will achieve human-level intelligence in the 2028 to 2150 range: poll

The problem with the poll isn't the sample (as the author suggests), rather its the fact that you can't predict such a thing, given any sample size/quality.

I would put it toward the high end myself: 2100 or later.

We have achieved decent success at specialized AI: pattern recognition, chess players, text to speech, speech to text, flying planes, even driving cars (which is harder for AI than flying planes). I strongly suspect self-driving cars will be on the consumer market by 2030, and that specialized AIs will be doing all kinds of complex tasks all over the economy by then.

But from what I know, we have achieved almost zero success at the general purpose AI or "strong AI" problem.

A lot of early AI optimism was fueled by the idea that general and specialized AI were more or less the same problem. If a computer can play chess well, then it should also be able to drive a car. We've found that this is most emphatically not the case. They appear to actually be different problems altogether. A great chess playing AI is utterly worthless at any domain other than chess. A great car-driving AI is utterly worthless for anything other than driving a car (or perhaps another vehicle with similar characteristics). Specialized AIs are very domain-specific.

The only form of AI that I know of that can work on a very wide array of problems without highly specialized domain tuning is genetic programming, and that requires serious gobs of processing power to do even trivial things.

Hubris aside, we really don't know what the brain is doing. We have some ideas, but they're fairly vague and early. There's a lot going on inside neurons, glial cells, and their genetic regulatory networks that we can't see... maybe even stuff at the quantum scale.

Then there's the whole issue of "consciousness," autonomy, self-orientation, self-direction, homeostasis, and all those related issues. This area is less well understood than neural data processing.

So I would be floored if we see it before 2100. Personally I think we'll have colonies on Mars long before we have strong human-scale AI.