> Can you define 'near' for me? Not sensibly in terms of years, no. It's more a handwaving gut feeling combined with an intuition. I didn't feel like there w

> Can you define 'near' for me? Not sensibly in terms of years, no. It's more a handwaving gut feeling combined with an intuition. I didn't feel like there was a royal road from symbolic AI to AGI. It doesn't feel to me like there is one from NNs either. As for the intuition: perhaps it's because it was my PhD topic, I have always felt that there needs to be a breakthrough in emergence, specifically in evolutionary computing (or some other system in which there is a tight feedback loop between behaviour and survival). Something to unshackle the development of AI from human beings deciding what behaviours they want to engineer. The resulting computation would be orders of magnitude less efficient, considerably less understandable (it is very unlikely to wash dishes or write poetry), but crucially much less fragile. And it has always been the fragility of the engineering which has made AI feel a little smoke and mirrors at times. NN are massively less fragile than symbolic systems, (and orders of magnitude less efficient, for problems symbolic systems are good at) but it does feel like we need another fundamental step. But, my feelings aside, I agree with the article because I recognise this could well be a 'Manhattan Project' type of event.