Well, yes, but that's still a straw man. It's not as if Hawking and Gates and so on saw an Atari-bot and on that basis came to worry about AGI. Current AI techn

Well, yes, but that's still a straw man. It's not as if Hawking and Gates and so on saw an Atari-bot and on that basis came to worry about AGI. Current AI technologies shouldn't update our estimates much about AGI, unless they push us way off of Kurzweil's (or someone else's) chart. I do agree that we lack evidence of a broad community of AI experts who have been able to make good predictions, which potentially puts AI research even behind economists! Nonetheless, we'd expect there to be a period between "wild guessing" and "good and reliable models"; Gates and Hawking either think we're in that middle ground, or they think the risks are considerable enough that it's worth pushing towards it now.