I think the flight analogy for AI is a good one; we have machines that let us fly, but we don't fly the way birds do. In many ways, the ways that we fly far exceed the capabilities of birds, but there are ways in which birds exceed the capability of our machines.

The issue with AGI as it's often framed is that it implicitly assumes a general intelligence like us, without any metric that can relate human intelligence and machine intelligence. We have machines that beat us in Go, so if we took those machines and somehow combined them with machines that beat us in Chess, Starcraft and Dota, are we any closer to AGI than we were previously? What about if that same AI can also drive a car? What's the standard, and where does it end? Where do we fall on that same metric?

There are also some fairly deep philosophical questions in this realm, too. For example, to what extent is the human experience (and intelligence) linked to our physical bodies? Cooking by smell and writing by sound are things we do on a daily basis that have no machine analogue. How important is the embodiment principle to AI? Certainly we don't do things by plugging our minds in directly -- we drive cars using the same limbs that we use for everything else, which probably has enormous efficiency advantages. To what extent can you separate the intelligence from the body and the environment?

Frankly, I believe we're a lot further away than we think. The last decade has taught us that relatively simple methods can be applied in surprisingly powerful ways, which is an important start, but it doesn't tell us anything about how close we actually are to a given goal, and how we might go about reaching it.

The question is: we are further away from what? The goalposts differ wildly, depending on who you ask. From a 1:1 copy of the human mind we are very far, because we also don't have an idea what a human mind is, heck we don't even have a common definition or understanding. Is a soul part of the mind? Should the AI have a soul too? And the rabbit hole goes only further down. So while for some the singularity might be around the corner, for others it's lightyears away. I guess the only way to have everybody agree is if the singularity hits us Skynet-style and I'm definitely not looking forward to that.

> we are further away from what? The goalposts differ wildly, depending on who you ask

literally anything

the intelligence of a wasp; the intelligence of a cat; the intelligence of a Downs syndrome person; the intelligence of a 3 month old baby

AI is very far from all of the above