It's difficult not to get caught up in the excitement around Deep Learning. The unsupervised nature of it at its best really does seem to approach human levels of learning (if not intelligence).

Also, I thought this was hilarious:

In a 2011 interview that predated DeepMind, co-founder Shane Legg said he gave only a 50 percent chance that human level-machine intelligence would exist by 2028.

ONLY?!? By 2028? That is a pretty radical prediction. Indeed, Legg says there is a 10% chance of human level intelligence by 2018, and 90% by 2050[1].

Legg has multiple papers published in the field of measuring machine intelligence, so I guess he has a pretty good view of the field.

If that 2028 prediction is even close to correct then I think setting up an ethics board now probably is the correct thing to do. (the notion that DeepMind asked that Google create an internal ethics board as a condition of the acquisition, as reported by The Information, had some AI researchers griping)

Edit: Legg's posting on his blog in 2011 deserves to be read:

I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged. That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war. I’d also like to add to this prediction that I expect to see an impressive proto-AGI within the next 8 years. By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed. It will also be able to solve a range of simple problems, including novel ones.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/691/shane_legg_on_risks...

[2] http://www.vetta.org/2011/12/goodbye-2011-hello-2012/