"But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever."

I'd like to point interested readers to the AGI Conference series[1], the Open Cognition Project[2], and a mostly outdated (2009) but still useful list of everything AGI[3].

[1] http://agi-conf.org/

[2] http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project

[3] http://linas.org/agi.html