If the article's main claim was "AGI is imminent", that would be a valid criticism. But it isn't (as the article says explicitly). The main claim is that technological progress is hard to forecast in general, especially for those not personally at the cutting edge of the field, and that almost no one right now is even really trying. Therefore, we should be very uncertain about AGI timelines. There's plenty of historical evidence, both in this article and elsewhere, to back up those claims.
(edit: I think your point about Winograd as a binary task not being explained clearly is valid, but that's not the article's main focus)
(edit 2: As far as I can tell, "trusting the experts" here means believing that we are very uncertain about AI timelines, which is essentially this article's main claim. All expert surveys I'm aware of confirm that the average AI expert is uncertain, and that there's also lots of disagreement between experts in the field. See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf)
And we're supposed to judge by the author's description of "silence" and "nervousness" that befell an expert panel. I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying, and are just not in the business of writing long-form articles to the public asking for donation.
> See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al.
A self-selected group of NIPS/ICML authors don't constitute experts. NIPS/ICML authors are the core of the community. The experts would be the top 1% of the community, i.e. either the authors with the most citations or most papers or just generally regarded highly by peers.
edit 1: Go players are not the experts I'm talking about. I'm talking about AI experts, and no not amateur AI hobbyists who know how to do Pseudo Monte Carlo. I mean, such as, people doing RL research. Watch, for instance, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMm0XaCFTJQ
"And we're supposed to judge by the author's description of "silence" and "nervousness" that befell an expert panel."
I make this judgment based on, among many other things, the tiny budgets given to people like Tetlock to study predicting events even a few years out; the fact that Kurzweil's very simple methods, basically "just draw a line through the curve", are still considered big news among many financial and political elites; that nobody had bothered to spend $100K on a good survey methodology for AI prediction, before the paper I linked came out earlier this year; that a friend of mine, who is supposed to run a (small budget) government program on forecasting, has to ask me where to get datasets on past tech progress because nobody has ever bothered to compile them into a standardized form, and so on.
"I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying"
What serious forecasting attempts, with specific dates attached to specific events, have been done in this vein?
"The experts would be the top 1% of the community"
IIRC, NIPS has around 5,000 people, so the top 1% would be like 50 people, and most of them won't respond to a survey. That's not a reasonable sample size.
(edit: this article doesn't ask for donations to anything; the links at the bottom are all to various papers and research materials, so getting money is obviously not the main goal)
(edit 2: the video linked is from after AlphaGo came out. I'm sure many people, after AlphaGo happened, claim that it was easily predicted. Again, hindsight is 20/20.)
(edit: I think your point about Winograd as a binary task not being explained clearly is valid, but that's not the article's main focus)
(edit 2: As far as I can tell, "trusting the experts" here means believing that we are very uncertain about AI timelines, which is essentially this article's main claim. All expert surveys I'm aware of confirm that the average AI expert is uncertain, and that there's also lots of disagreement between experts in the field. See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al.: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf)
(edit 3: "No expert was surprised with Alphago." just isn't true. See eg. this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/2wgukb/why_do_people.... Hindsight is always 20/20.)