It's an interesting article. I'm not sure I agree with it 100% - I would say a lot depends on the larger picture and incentives. Right now, there is a huge inc

It's an interesting article. I'm not sure I agree with it 100% - I would say a lot depends on the larger picture and incentives. Right now, there is a huge incentives to create "narrow AIs" because they help improve productivity and get rid of tedious labor, from facial recognition to harvesting machines. So, none of those AIs has 'skin in the game' or as the paper calls is 'are in this world'. However, if there were a concerted push to give AIs 'skin in the game' and try to solve more general problems (the poker AIs look interesting, for instance), the situation might be different. I'm thinking along the lines of the essay "Golem XIV" or the TV show "person of interest". In these SciFi scenarios, governments give machines very high level objectives ("protect the country!") and skin in the game, which then ultimately leads to reaching "consciousness". I don't see how with current economic incentives, such efforts would be fundable, the narrow AI field is sucking up all the talent and $$$. But if someone were to massively fund efforts like this, I wouldn't rule out progress in that direction. Spoken as someone with practically nil education in ML and AI :)