Those systems seem close to a dog's intelligence only because you haven't worked on them and don't know how they work. Nothing about this field is obvious. If y

Those systems seem close to a dog's intelligence only because you haven't worked on them and don't know how they work. Nothing about this field is obvious. If you are not an expert, just look at the history. People thought at the dawn of this field over 60 years ago (yes, really) that machine intelligence was right around the corner. The optimists have been wrong for more than six decades and they are wrong now. If you are an expert you can look at speech recognition, computer vision, and all these things you mention, and compare them to the intelligence and awareness of a dog, and realize that they are not close, not in the ballpark, not in the same league, not even the same sport. The ANN/DL research is not moving in the direction of AGI and nobody in industry and almost nobody in academia is bothered by that because ML is getting results and careers are being made, while chasing AGI means spending your career on something that almost certainly will not show any results. If anything, the current success of deep learning means we are further away from AGI than we would have been (which is probably a good thing) because there are fewer people working on it.