This certainty comes from being more knowledgeable in the field of Reinforcement Learning than the vast majority of his readers. It's not hot air, I think he has good reasons, but they can't be expressed so easily. I got this intuition after reading many RL papers and I completely agree with him. In fact I am grateful to him for expressing this intuition better than I could have.
The main idea: it's the environment, not the brain/neural net that is the bottleneck. Intelligence is situated, limited by the complexity of the environment and problem it has to solve. You can't have a singularity in a vat. The environment matters most.
Human environment puts a hard limit on intelligence in our society. If we can create richer environments, intelligence could increase, but not exponentially. It's still limited even in the new environment. The exponential trend of AI is at most a sigmoid.
Plus - I think the community needs some hard truth, and the hype is way off right now. That's probably why he was so sure of himself - it was community service.
The main idea: it's the environment, not the brain/neural net that is the bottleneck. Intelligence is situated, limited by the complexity of the environment and problem it has to solve. You can't have a singularity in a vat. The environment matters most.
Human environment puts a hard limit on intelligence in our society. If we can create richer environments, intelligence could increase, but not exponentially. It's still limited even in the new environment. The exponential trend of AI is at most a sigmoid.
Plus - I think the community needs some hard truth, and the hype is way off right now. That's probably why he was so sure of himself - it was community service.