> We're trying to get machines to think, but we only have the barest understanding of how we, as humans, think... But thinking we can create "AGI" without first increasing our understanding of "wet" neural nets is the height of hubris.

That depends on the landscape of the solution space. If the techniques that work much better than anything else happen to be the same techniques used within our own brains, then we might find them, through aggressive experimentation and exploration, before we even realize that it's also how our own brains work too.