What is the "irreplaceable" part of human biology that leads to consciousness? Microtubules? Whatever it is, we could presumably build something artificial that has it.
Interestingly the people doing the actual envelope pushing in this domain, such as Ilya Sutskever, think that there it’s a scaling problem, and neural nets do result in AGIs eventually, but I haven’t heard them substantiate it.
(I'm asking because of your statement, "Don’t fool yourself into believing artificial intelligence is not one breakthrough away", which I'm not sure I understand, but if I am parsing it correctly, I question your basis for saying it.)
“one breakthrough away” as in some breakthrough away
This is not much different than saying that it’s possible to fly a spacecraft to another galaxy because spacecrafts exist and other galaxies exist.
Possible and practically attainable are two far different things.
It is very different. We have never seen a spacecraft reach another galaxy so we don't know it is possible.
We have an example of what we call intelligence arising in matter. We don't know what hurdles there are between current AI and an AGI, but we know that AGI is possible.
Let me know when I’ll be able to buy my $30,000 car with level 5 self driving.
I find anyone with confident answers to questions like these immediately suspect.