There is no kill switch because it won't happen overnight. It will happen in phases where slowly our devices just get more intelligent until one day they'll do what they need to do without our intervention.
Right, but what I wonder is why we would need something that already does what we want without intervention to become even smarter (leading to it possibly becoming all-powerful)? What are the real-world advantages of making it self-aware?
Unassisted learning will unleash great advances in computing. Imagine not having to write a program to accomplish some task, but rather just putting some ai in an environment with some obstacle and letting it figure out how to teach itself to overcome it. Advantage: no more need for humans to have to program. Disadvantage: self-aware, all-powerful AI.
>Unassisted learning will unleash great advances in computing. (...) Advantage: no more need for humans to have to program. Disadvantage: self-aware, all-powerful AI.
So it's like "nuclear bombs will kill all pesky mosquitos. Disadvantage: humanity wiped out too".