What is the likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of Human Level Machine Intelligence (i.e. machines that can accomplish a wide range of important tasks at least as good as human experts)?

Discontinuity in progress occurs when a particular technological advance pushes some progress metric substantially above what would be expected based on extrapolating past progress. If AI progress is unusually lumpy, i.e., arriving in unusually fewer larger packages rather than in the usual many smaller packages, then future progress might arrive faster than we would expect by simply looking at past progress. Moreover, if one AI team finds a big lump, it might jump way ahead of the other teams. According to 

, discontinuity on the path to AGI, lends itself to: