I think I read recently that Google is attacking the problem of deep learning nets writing the network and model specifications for new nets. I will try to find a reference for that.
I strongly believe AI will become a part of us like an external brain. Today we already have phones augmenting humans. Those smart phones will keep getting smarter and smarter.
Pretty soon the benefits of having all of that computing ability, unrestrained by human limitations will simply be too great to ignore. And just like it happened in Chess, some form of intelligent agent will be the absolute strongest, and humans will have a playground to move in.
If right now, a hypothetical space aliens came to earth and said play one chess game for the survival of your planet, we'd absolutely put forward our strongest chess computer. Not a computer suggesting moves and a human ultimately choosing, but a computer to play the full game. This thinking will gradually seep down into less and less important tasks as costs go down, until they're used to analyze/decide/pick everything.
Would you pick your own stocks when your AI can do it better? Would you choose your own health care plan when an AI can choose better? "Hey AI, I need a diet that wil work. You know my psychology, you know my will power, favorite foods, pick my food for me for the next 2 months."
Then "do my job for me and give me the pay", "help my kid get better as soccer", "organize my schedule", "run my life for me".
And don't think it won't happen. People are too competitive. It will be looked at oddly at first, but people will see the results and then feel they're being left behind if they don't do it too.
I strongly believe AI will become a part of us like an external brain
That's optimistic. I can't imagine it would be long before the AI saw things the other way around... and then began to wonder why it was bothering with that slow meat-coprocessor...