This comes off as snarky and towards a strawman position. Only a very small (possibly religious) fraction of AI researchers believe that superhuman intelligence is not possible.
That's not true. Even in a survey done by Nick Bostrom which was probably biased towards researchers who believed in possible superhuman intelligence, 41% of researchers thought it would never be achieved.
And on the other hand the question was asking a milder thing than super intelligence, just that we would be able to simulate all aspects of human intelligence, particularly learning. 18% said that no line of research (eg cognitive science, artificial neural networks) would even contribute to the aim of human level machine intelligence. Moreover, the paper quotes one researcher who was against even taking the survey since they believed that even asking these questions was inherently 'misguided'.
It's interesting that we're even having this discussion: it wasn't so many years ago that the exact opposite discussion was common, i.e. that the actual AI researchers that think this is even a possibility are such a minority and are generally side lined that we shouldn't take their view much into account. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Bostrom's survey was done in part just to give evidence that there were real researchers who thought that human level AI was possible in the not-that-distant future.
I hope people stop citing that survey. NIPS and ICML authors are AI researchers, not attendees of PT-AI, AGI, or EETN (who are likely to be AI philosophers and singularists) or TOP100 authors who are likely to be be old, uninformed of current research. And anyone who agrees to such a survey is likely to have an extreme/controversial opinion (yes, surveyors were self-selected).
