Well, yes, at the moment machine learning is scooping up low-hanging fruit in a lot of areas. Whether that will lead to AGI somehow is pure speculation. It is

Well, yes, at the moment machine learning is scooping up low-hanging fruit in a lot of areas. Whether that will lead to AGI somehow is pure speculation. It is of course true that solving AGI solves most other problems (while creating new ones that we are by no means ready to handle) but that doesn't mean it's likely to happen. Hopefully it doesn't anytime soon. There are other possible breakthroughs. Just as a random example, humanoid robots with effective IQ 60 that could be trained to do all our current manual labor. That would completely transform society and we would be sorting it out for decades. Or it might become possible for someone in a garage to synthesize infectious biological agents and intentionally or accidentally wipe us all out. Or we could get cheap energy beamed down as microwaves from solar-powered satellites. While it's true that AGI changes everything, it's not the only thing that can change everything, and you can't predict what will happen once everything changes.