Ray Kurzweil @ Future of Humanity Institution "Creating Human-Level AI: How and When | Ray Kurzweil"

In addition Ray Kurzweil on privacy:

Apparently he hasn't heard of intelligence agencies? Privacy and human rights get violated. AGI could make this violation of rights even easier. In terms of cybersecurity to make an exocortex secure is extremely challenging and no we aren't good at keeping information private because we can cite the recent Yahoo hack to see evidence we aren't.

My opinion, his optimistic prediction for reaching AGI is possible. At least based on my current understanding of the theory I can see how it could happen by 2029. At the same time I think he under plays the risks. Just because humans have AGI it doesn't mean human nature will be significantly changed by 2029, or that society will be significantly more advanced, or ethical. If you enjoy how things are then if nothing changes dramatically then in 2029 we could have more of the same but in extremes with AGI.

We can see from the past election that AI isn't being used only to improve people's lives but to influence how people vote and shop. Twitter bots do get used to influence public opinion and sentiment. And of course we have the danger of autonomous weapons which could be created by AGI. If we look at most tech companies we don't see great respect for human rights, or for human liberty, and in many cases we see profit making at the expense of human liberty. Why should we believe in 2029 when these companies are given AGI that they'll adopt more advanced principles or use the AGI to defend rights?

Optimism is important as it inspires people to create progress but at the same time we need to deal with the huge insecurity gap which people who understand cyber security and ethics are more conditioned to notice. If it were the case that as technology became more sophisticated that human rights (and liberty) increased, were enforced more effectively, then I would have great optimism that we are ready for AGI. Currently, we are seeing regressions in liberty and human rights, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who notices these trends which are happening in correlation with technological advances.