Moving goalposts is fine, and I speak as the opposite of an AI skeptic, thinking as I do that it's 70% likely general AI is invented in the next 15 years. You move the goalposts when you discover that the goal you set didn't match what you were trying to achieve.

I think that it's now possible to give goals that you know you probably won't have to change, but those goals, by their nature, are worse metrics for current research. One example would be that the AI should learn in response to human instruction by text, video and audio, as well and as fast as a human being does with the same access to that instructor, across a variety of tasks. This would be something like "online multi-modal few-shot learning" in the current jargon, and you can see that most research isn't really working on it – probably because it's still really hard to get good results. But there's not much hope of solving the harder problems without solving the easier sub-problems first.