Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right - Arthur C. Clarke Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want? *Corrected by kranner
Hinton says that superintelligence is still 20 years away, and even then he only gives his prediction a 50% chance. A far cry from the few year claim. You must be doing that "strawberry" thing again? To us humans, A-l-t-m-a-n is not H-i-n-t-o-n.
I don't know the details of Hinton's probability distribution. If his prediction is normally distributed with a mean of 20 years and a SD of 15, which is reasonable for such a difficult and contentious prediction, that puts over 10% of the probability in the next 3 years.
Is 10% a lot? For sports betting, not really. For Mankind's Last Invention, I would argue that it is.