Consciousness appears to be a form of intelligence. Is it required for general intelligence (whatever that means)? We don't know. Would humans be classified as having general intelligence if we weren't conscious? In any case, I perhaps worded that poorly. I wasn't saying that consciousness is the same as intelligence, it was just an example of how little we actually understand intelligence.

> AGI simply means that we can create a type of machine that can do any kind of mental task that a human can, at least at a human level.

What does this even mean? What is human level? The ability to write a symphony? Or the ability to calculate 2+2=4? These are such poorly defined metrics that I don't understand how can we then start throwing around very precise (and short!) timelines for attaining it.

The statement: "we'll send a human mission to Mars in the next 5 years" is 10x more believable than this breathless AGI hype, because at least the former is well defined.