content: I agree with you. I think the threat of a truly conscious AI is far away, and its simply very profitable to talk about the singularity and transhumanism. It's a form of sci-fi that immerses us in the story. But these "intelligences" we have today are far and away from thinking. (That's not to dismiss them as trivial, not at all) If we are truly enlightened, we wouldn't be trying to create a conscious machine at all. It's the exactly wrong way to go about this, and totally misses the point. Quantum computing could be a threat if it turns out that human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. The theories involving microtubules in neuronal axons behaving as quantum computers are really interesting. If it turns out that consciousness - in terms of this personal subjective experience and the ability to understand - is a quantum effect, yes we could be in for a wild ride. But, when you consider that the human brain has 100 billion neurons and perhaps more than 1e^19 total qubits then, we are talking about unimaginably complex computation. Let alone the fact that science still does not understand how different neural circuits communicate at the macro level and it appears to be through voltage fields, means the way the brain communicates looks absolutely nothing like what any modern neural network does.  So we are a long way off. But I do think quantum could be the answer, specifically because of its probabalistic nature. It could be the fact of superpositions in microtubule configurations that introduces that randomness into our thinking. Rather than being completely deterministic outputs like in a von Neumann machine, the randomness introduces noise that seems to better model the human brain and produces better outcomes. Randomness is a feature of our thinking, and that's probably a nod to the fact the brain does operate at the quantum level. But scientists and engineers seem to be getting closer to that realization, which is that we need to stop trying to force matter to execute centralized computations, and let matter be the computation. When you go down this rabbit hole, pretty quickly you begin to realize that this is exactly what life is all about. A computational system that's been evolving from matter for tens of millions of years. And then those cute lil' humans are here with TrueNorth saying, "We're close!" If we think of an analogy between collective evolution and the evolutionary arc of a single human life, we are at that post-ego stage right now, but right about at the point of puberty, where things get chaotic, but a self-consciousness is now salient, and we're suddenly very interested in our own bodies (the collective is interested in consciousness). But that also means, by this analogy, that a true self-understanding is a long way off. All that said, it won't take a conscious machine to totally disrupt massive labor markets in the low-end of the intellectual spectrum. We are going to hit a massive bottleneck as far as human individual importance goes. What passes through will be brain power. There is going to be a massive and pretty destructive IQ bottleneck probably within the next century, and it's scary to think about.