“AI will follow the same progression, from these first practical applications to a deep theoretical understanding of knowledge creation. I hope it doesn’t take 100 years. But when it happens, strong AI will follow. Inevitably.”

Some believe in the eternal supremacy of the human species, and that machines will never reach or surpass human intelligence.

You believe that strong AI can be created, but first, we have to acquire “a deep theoretical understanding of knowledge creation” (and how strong AI works) as a precondition.

But have you ever considered, that strong AI could emerge without human authorship, by Darwinian principle?

Species evolve over time, and thus chickens had ancestors that were not chickens — intelligent machines could have ancestors that were not intelligent or did not fully understand what intelligence is. And it has happened before when intelligent humans evolved from unintelligent cosmic matter.
There is no reason to believe that the Darwinian evolution is limited to the biological realm. An alterable code is all that’s needed, whether it’s in silicon or in biological matter. The evolution will be much faster in self-altering code with billions of operations per second than in spontaneous genetic mutations or progenies who occur only once every 30 years between human generations.