P.S. It's hard to deal with so much inconsistency. This person says they fully agree with

> I do not understand how you can see what has happened in the last 3 years and say "it will not get us there" no matter what "there" is.

and at the same time says

> When people have a very narrow 'confidence interval' about their AI predictions, in either direction, it's difficult to trust them.

and says

> The last 3 years of progress have been so explosive and, yes, general that it seems crazy to fully rule out dramatic future progress

and then moves those goalposts to "AGI, RSI, the apocalypse, whatever".

Fine ... let's not trust folks who are so confident that the progress in last 3 years entails that "it will get us there" where there includes AGI. Again, it's an argument against a strawman to say "it seems crazy to fully rule out dramatic future progress" -- everyone agrees that there will be dramatic future progress. But it's obnoxious naysaying to insist that "the last 3 years of progress" entails future AGI, when numerous people have explained why they think it doesn't. [Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to characterize as "crazy" people you're trying to persuade.]

And qualifiers matter ... so when someone says [emphasis added]

> yet we are not that dazzled by our calculators today (despite how useful they might be!)

it is yet another strawman argument to respond

> Speak for yourself, I am dazzled by calculators!

And on the "general" front, there's a big difference between AI that can address a wide range of problems -- what one might call gAI for varying values of "general" -- and AGI, an artificial replication of the sort of generalized intelligence found in human beings, who can learn to fish by being shown how to fish, or learn to repair an engine by being shown how to repair an engine, or learn how to play a game by being told the rules of the game, etc.

I read all this an am baffled about how you're seeing inconsistency.

All of these statements say the same thing: "People are sure about a low upper confidence bound for future AI. My upper confidence bound about AI is high; the future is massively uncertain"