Robots Can’t Dance – Why the singularity is greatly exaggerated (2015)

What makes you say that? I could see your statement being self-evidently true only if you meant "fundamental to the creation of an anthropomorphized AI." Of course, even that glosses over the fact that there are already strong indications within the AI community that the first general purpose AI will likely not "think" even remotely in the same fashion as humans do.

I don't agree that this is true in any way that precludes the creation of "true, autonomous AI". We may not understand the specific mechanisms of how our brains give rise to creativity and the resulting "implementation artifacts", but the fundamental part of creativity (and I'd argue, the part that's relevant to AI) is the ability to efficiently search huge but structured hypothesis spaces and inductively learn new structure (very likely with some stochastic element involved).

That is something that we not only have an understanding of, but have implemented, more than once. By way of examples:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-... http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its... https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47...

To try to see it in a grossly simplified step by step fashion: in the abstract, does seem similar to how a human would think of the game though; consider promising moves, where promising is some fuzzy intuition based on the pattern of the board -> for each of those, read how the responses might look like (which the computer does way way more than the human), and what you discover using this suggests other promising moves -> and at some depth of each such read, evaluate the board position; who looks ahead, which too is some fuzzy-ish intuition based on the board patern (though there are various heuristics humans would use when learning this). Computer also evaluates further, a number of fast playouts to the end and mixes this with that pattern-based evaluation.

Is this the kind of thought process you'd associate with creativity? Seems search-based, analytic and strategic; only funny thing is how evaluations are pattern-based nebulous things, but that seems an implementation detail. In some situations, you may come up with evaluation procedures like say material advantage in chess and code the relevant decision procedure, in others, you'd "code" the decision procedure implicitly, by specifying a dataset that exemplifies the desired function, and use statistics to come up with that function. Increases the kinds of decisions you can implement tremendously as you can leverage implicit rather than just explicit knowledge, yes -- but conceptually kinda the same.

Transferring local patterns between images and playing Go have recently been shown to be a few more of those things. But how far will that generalize? Nobody knows.

This is not to say that it can't ever be done, just that right now it isn't done by people claiming they can do it. That articles with results similar to 100x cheaper random texture synthesis from 15 years ago get published and hyped in the general press tells you how much of an AI bubble we live in right now.

Kurweil's contribution to AI pales in comparison to the likes of Norvig etc.

Aren't the opponents of the belief in a technological singularity saying the precise opposite: that a designer can't possibly hope to mimic the effects of billions of years of biochemistry in reaching the little-understood goal of general intelligence in self-replicating organisms by designing computation machines and deciding on what outputs they'd like the evolutionary algorithm they've written to optimize for.