For flight, the components necessary were obvious very early on: you need some kind of structure to hold you aloft and some kind of powered apparatus to propel you forwards. Once those were found, mechanical flight was achieved (and unpowered flight was already possible long before that).
What are the components of intelligence? For example, AlphaZero can solve problems that are hard for humans to solve in the domain of chess, shogi and go- is it intelligent? Is its problem-solving ability, limited as it is to the domain of three board games, a necessary component of general intelligence? Have we even made any tiny baby steps on the road to AGI, with the advances of the last few years, or are we merely chasing our tails in a dead end of statistical approximation that will never sufficiently, well, approximate, true intelligence?
These are very hard questions to answer and the most conservative answers suggest that AGI will not happen in a short time, as a sudden growth spurt that takes us from no-AGI to AGI. With flight, it sufficed to blow up a big balloon with hot air and- tadaaaa! Flight. There really seems to be no such one neat trick for AGI. It will most likely be tiny baby steps all the way up.
What are the components of intelligence? For example, AlphaZero can solve problems that are hard for humans to solve in the domain of chess, shogi and go- is it intelligent? Is its problem-solving ability, limited as it is to the domain of three board games, a necessary component of general intelligence? Have we even made any tiny baby steps on the road to AGI, with the advances of the last few years, or are we merely chasing our tails in a dead end of statistical approximation that will never sufficiently, well, approximate, true intelligence?
These are very hard questions to answer and the most conservative answers suggest that AGI will not happen in a short time, as a sudden growth spurt that takes us from no-AGI to AGI. With flight, it sufficed to blow up a big balloon with hot air and- tadaaaa! Flight. There really seems to be no such one neat trick for AGI. It will most likely be tiny baby steps all the way up.