It is impossible to justify saying with absolute certainty that AGI is nowhere near. You don’t know that. And in this case you have to assume the worst case, not the best case.

AGI will come when the substrate for AGI is laid down. We probably have already done that. As cloud computing matures, we will approach a world where every computer offers its computational resources on a global compute market. At some point between here and there, we will reach a place where compute is cheap enough that experiments will occur regularly that are sufficiently massive to dredge up the solution. And improvements in MRI fidelity, underlying improvements in computing technology and other things will only shorten the fuse. There is no reason why this couldn’t happen tomorrow.

Only one thing is sure: without a computational substrate to stir from, AGI cannot come to be.