> So far there is no evidence that this is actually doable over anything but billions of years (and even then we have no idea how nature really managed it).
"The brain is so mysterious and unique, that we should abandon all attempts to even try to apply results like the general approximation theorem to it and discard all signs that some approximation is happening."
Why we don't see signs of intelligence in the universe? The simplest self-replicator requires accidental synthesis of the sequence of 200 (or so) RNA nucleobases.
BTW, your argument could have been applied word-for-word to powered flight in 1899. In short, argumentum ad ignorantiam.
No. To realize the possibility of powered flight one only needs to look at birds. AGI, on the other hand, is another word for God.
Just define "general" as "as general as allowed by math, physics, and practical limitations." Or use a conventional reading of AGI as a human-level intelligence (which we, naturally, have a working example of).
Yeah but if you do that, you have to then turn around and look at how all the goalposts keep moving around. That is what I was (originally) trying to get at, and why I phrased it like I did. If we truly had actual (artificial) general intelligence (or were close to it) we would already have a solid definition/benchmark (and it... Probably wouldn't be what you said, but something a lot more detailed/thorough). Right now both AGI and ASI is just... Whatever. "It earns a hundred billion dollars in revenue," "It can do anything a general human can do" (ignoring the shear amount of ambiguity alone in that), "It can do most tasks a human can do" (again, ambiguous: which human, which tasks, on and on and on).