Recommended reading before it becomes an archive:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/we...24markoff.html

The Coming Superbrain.
Computers keep getting smarter, while we just stay the same.
An omission from the NY Times article, Isaac Asimov's I Robot, a 1950 story.

The article gives a date 2045. I can see robots coming sooner.

I have to imagine that a super grandmaster Robot will play another super grandmaster Robot for the World Championship. Or if we are on Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn's moons, the Universal Championship.

You have to remember, we study chess in today's world with computer software, with a coach, or with books, notebooks, 3x5 or 5x8 cards
or Opening magazines. When Robots come just as in Star Wars, the Robot plugs into a terminal and knowledge is entered.

For any reasonable definition of robot, robots are already here.

But I don't think that general-purpose AI will happen in my lifetime, and I'm fairly young. It's far too stupid and far too hard to teach it. The predictions from the AI researchers in the 1960s and 1970s would have strong general AI by the year 2000, and we still have trouble with AI doing even very simple tasks (like driving a car along empty streets).

The questions of singularity (will it happen? can it? when?) are interesting, but they won't need to be addressed in my lifetime.

Now expert/specialized AI will makegreat progress, though. Most controversial will probably be the move to replace doctors (other than surgeons, at least for now) with expert systems relying on massive databases.