One thing that is for sure though is that once we have artificial general intelligence, everything changes infinitely forever.
"Hopefully machine learning techniques give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."
"Hopefully knowledge graphs give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."
"Hopefully Bayesian models give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."
"Hopefully rule-based systems give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."
"Hopefully LISP gives us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."
"Hopefully computers give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."
People have said approximations to all of these over time. All of these probably are building blocks. But there's no reason to believe that we're about to build the top of the tower.
I believe we should understand AI in terms of what it can do for us now, and that AGI keeps appearing to be 50 years away because it's actually centuries away and we don't even understand what we don't understand yet.
I really don't see why DNN change the game fundamentally. I mean graphical models, they really changed the way of thinking in the field. DNNs in contrast are really still fundamentally building on things built by Yann LeCunn and gang.
How do you think it will change everything infinitely forever? Are you confident this would be a positive change for us and all species on earth? This is where I'm a little lost about the enthusiasm for AGI but I'm curious what others think?
The first few improvements may be tough for it, but when you consider that it could think 1000s of times faster than humans, you can imagine how this could happen very quickly.
And then once you assume that it can recursively improve itself, we enter the realm of "the intelligence with the IQ of 5000."
The person with the highest IQ ever was 190 [1]. Imagine the kind of things we could do with an intelligence of 5000. We're talking atomic reassemblers, grand unified theories, and (my dream) a personal paradise Matrix for everyone [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant [2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3183
Note, this sidesteps all ethical alignment issues. This is assuming that the intelligence is on the same team as us. My thought process is "we're all going to die anyway so let's give it a shot," but a lot of people disagree with me (which is fair).