The atomic bomb is a good contrast. In the early 30s we knew a bomb was possible (Szilard‘s patent was in 1933) but there were huge engineering problems to overcome (enriching uranium). But we knew that even if we couldn’t scale up isotope separation and we had to go there long way around, we could still make a bomb with enough time.

There is no Szilard patent for AGI: no one has any theory on how to make it work other then “make it bigger,” which as this article points out hasn’t paid off like we’d hoped.

I’d have a lot more faith that AGI is possible if we had any kind of theory or roadmap on how to get there. Counting on a black box inventing it for us seems like waiting for a million monkeys to finish King Lear 2.