Several talks from the recent Singularity conference are now online and linked up at the Singularity Institute website.    I just read the transcript of Google’s Peter Norvig who seemed cautious but optimistic. 

Norvig is clearly one of the key insiders working in one of the places where a general AI could possibly crop up even without human intervention, though I got the idea Norvig felt that was not likely anytime soon.    I was disappointed he didn’t elaborate on what Marissa Mayer mentioned to me last month after her keynote at the Search Strategies conference – the idea that search results for some queries are increasingly looking more and more like the product of human-like intelligence.    I should note that Mayer did not seem to think this was a sign of impending general AI from the Googleplex – she just thought it was a very interesting development.