My take on how it&#x27;s going to happen is that it allready has.<p>Most technologies we build, and use, surpass humans in some capacity. Thinking is no exceptions and we allready have machines far better than humans at some thnking tasks, such as arithmetic.<p>We are now working on systems surpassing humans in various recognition and prediction tasks.<p>I suspect the catalog of tasks far better done by machines will continue to expand to finally encompass all tasks required to form a general intelligence. Only, the trick to assemble them, into a complete system could very well prove tricky.<p>The result, though, is that there will never exist such a thing as human level artificial intelligence because, if and when, a system of general intelligence is created all its components will far surpass human equivalent capabilities.<p>So &quot;smarter&quot; simply means far superior to any human in any task requiring thinking, in the same sense that computers are far superior to any human at arithmetic.<p>Even some odd genius savant of today cannot compete with computers at number crunching. More interestingly it&#x27;s not even interesting to compare, the difference in potential performance is just at different scales all together.