I think if I had to pick a strawman expression to thoroughly defeat, it would be something like "You can't go to the moon by shooting a very big canon". Becaus

I think if I had to pick a strawman expression to thoroughly defeat, it would be something like "You can't go to the moon by shooting a very big canon". Because on the one hand, yeah, no explosion-based canon is going to get you to the moon; there's just no way to give a payload enough initial momentum to escape the earth's gravity well without killing any humans in that payload. On the other hand, once you have canons, Newtonian physics, and an understanding that the moon is a very distant rock and not, like, a spirit god or something, then you have enough information to realize that going to the moon is only a matter of time and enough iterative improvements on those canons. It doesn't require inventing a completely novel technology like portals or teleporters or whatever. (Though it requires a ton of improvements in material science, engineering, computing, etc.) And I think it's meaningful that From the Earth to the Moon was Jules Vernes' third book, and A trip to the Moon the first science-fiction movie even made. People could see the writing on the wall. It's harder to make any predictions about AGI, because intelligence is a much fuzzier target than "reaching escape velocity". But it feels like neural networks are closer to the canon than to the pile of chairs: a basic concept that might not be capable of reaching general intelligence, but is only one or two steps removed from one that will reach it given enough engineering and money;