We have billions of examples of babies growing up to learn to spell and tie their shoes, therefore it's very reasonable to assume that that's a skill most babie

We have billions of examples of babies growing up to learn to spell and tie their shoes, therefore it's very reasonable to assume that that's a skill most babies will get to. There are 0 examples of a man made construct reaching "general" intelligence (whatever fuzzy meaning you may attach to it); there is no reason to believe that because we can reach some arbitrary human milestone today ("be a world class Go player"), any other human milestone ("start and run a company, and be a mentor and inspiration to others") is plausible. This is a very different case from e.g. "we built a prototype plane that can lift 15 ft off the ground for 10 seconds, we should be able to build one that can lift 10,000 feet for 10 hours", because in the former case we were beginning to have an understanding of aerodynamics that made that path plausible. We do not have such an understanding backing current ML work. That's well illustrated by the fact that only 6 years elapsed between the first manned flight and crossing the Atlantic by plane - practice caught up to theory really fast, as it tends to do in those cases. We are about 6 years in the current ML revolution - what is its equivalent to crossing the Atlantic? The logic you're advocating for here is more along the lines of "I taught my dog how to sit - shouldn't be too hard to get him to sit in front of a computer and start writing Python code now that I've got the first half figured out". (or - I taught my dog how to fetch - shouldn't be too hard to train him to be a full time food delivery employee, etc).