IMHO there are two distinct paths towards AGI. One is understanding intelligence - I believe that if we "just" knew how to make the "brain software" (and we're really far from that), our current compute power could support many human-or-higher-power AIs at a relatively cheap price. And the second is pure raw brute force, either through simulation-without-understanding of brains, or perhaps it will turn out that sufficient intelligence may be reachable simply through a sufficiently large critical mass of e.g. simulated cortical columns. We're also really far from that, however, one aspect is that the latter approach is progressing even if there's literally zero progress in understanding intelligence and AI; as long as we can sustain an exponential increase of FLOPS/$, we will eventually reach it.

I guess if you think about it like that then you really don't need to think about any problem in the future because the singularity will solve it for us. People also think the rapture is around the corner. I can't predict or discount either but I do notice a similarity.

> The way in which things are trending, an Idiocracy is unlikely because of an AGI singularity.

The way in which things are trending, an AGI singularity is unlikely because of the IQ decline over time.