If the hypothesis this article is aiming to strike down is that there is currently a clear path to solving AGI, then it's simply fighting a potential misconception of the masses. The reality is that recent advances in AI, while not providing the full picture, are quite strong. Object recognition ten years ago, even at the level of 2011's Imagenet results, seemed impossible. The downsides to deep learning mentioned in the article, are both clear side effects of the formulation, and simultaneously being addressed by the community in various ways. For what it's worth, I'm with LeCun and Hinton on this one. The abstract human reasoning required for even high level perceptual tasks is difficult for humans to consciously dissect, but it could easily be that it's actually relatively mundane when subjected to appropriate representations.