The technological struggles are in some ways beside the point. The financial bet on artificial general intelligence is so big that failure could cause a depression.
I don’t think you can define AGI in a way that would make it substrate dependent. It’s simply about behaving in a certain way. Sufficiently complex set of ‘if -> then’ statements could pass as AGI. The limitation is computation power and practicality of creating the rules. We already have supercomputers that could easily emulate AGI but we don’t have a practical way of writing all the ‘if -> then’ rules and I don’t see how creating the rules could be substrate dependent.
Edit: Actually, I don’t know if current supercomputers could process input fast enough to pass as AGI but it’s still about computation power, not substrate. There’s nothing suggesting we will not be able to keep increasing computational power without some biological substrate.
Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.
I don’t think you can define AGI in a way that would make it substrate dependent. It’s simply about behaving in a certain way. Sufficiently complex set of ‘if -> then’ statements could pass as AGI. The limitation is computation power and practicality of creating the rules. We already have supercomputers that could easily emulate AGI but we don’t have a practical way of writing all the ‘if -> then’ rules and I don’t see how creating the rules could be substrate dependent.
Edit: Actually, I don’t know if current supercomputers could process input fast enough to pass as AGI but it’s still about computation power, not substrate. There’s nothing suggesting we will not be able to keep increasing computational power without some biological substrate.