Second, when we "want" human minds in a possessive industrial sense, it is almost always for a small fraction of their capabilities. (Thank God our need to classify images does not seem to explicitly require servile machines with, say, the ability to love.)
When I was studying pre-deep learning statistical ML in the oughts, it was quite clear that the ML Renaissance was made possible by ignoring romantic ideas about human or expert level performance, and choosing operational criteria around improvement at specific tasks. People building PGMs or complex MCMc models rarely discussed whether larger versions of their models could think. Perhaps early uncertainty about how some DL methods worked opened the door to magical thinking about the possibilities of massive nets.
I think AGI should be thought of as an artistic or poetic interest, which can align with and comment on scientific progress, but is not actually part of the main research dialogue.
Younger generations eventually succeed older generations as they die off. If we create something better, wouldn’t that just be a better new humanity to succeed the old one?