>For example, I work in aging and, to a lesser extent, neuroscience. I have had many private conversations with researchers who will candidly say that the long-term goal of their work is lifespan extension or cognitive enhancement. Yet, for the purposes of grant and paper-writing, you'd never write such a thing; it would sound too speculative.
I think it was Scientific American or another such magazine that ran a story, maybe a month and a half ago, in which they interviewed a whole bunch of real theoretical and computational neuroscientists about mind uploading. A not-that-small portion of these admitted that when they are in private, have had a drink or two, and are ready to admit things they would never say in a grant application, they are definitely trying to achieve whole-brain emulation.
Hell, it's basically the implicit point of the Human Brain Project, or whatever those initiatives are called by the US and EU governments this past year.
> You are right that you won't see many researchers publicly talking about human-level AI, or framing their research in terms of the search for general AI. But that doesn't mean the field is "dead".
Indeed. What instead happened is that actual humanlike cognition has been steadily broken down into subproblems and each subproblem is being formalized and worked-on separately. There are a few papers on optimal utility-maximizing agents for general environments, but those tend to require "until the stars burn out" levels of FLOPs to work anyway.
So actually, AI is going to work, but by the time it does, it won't be called AI. In fact, the researchers who'll create it would look at you funny for calling it AI. They do and will have lots of academic jargon used for specifying exactly what their algorithms do and how they do it, so much so that only when their algorithm kills all humans will anyone actually admit it was artificial intelligence ;-).