To reuse a point brought up quite often in this context, making predictions about when and if AGI might arrive based on extrapolations of current technological trends is like trying to predict when the atom bomb would have been created based on a chart of conventional explosive yields leading up to 1940. Undiscovered discoveries are not predictable, certainly not by extrapolating from the current progress. This applies to Kurzweil's highly optimistic predictions as much as it does to negative ones.
Whether or not it's likely we'll see AGI any time soon is, IMO, a matter of wild-ass-guessing more than anything else. There are no experts in AGI right now, only philosophers, because the field doesn't even exist. So nobody has any remotely educated guess about what algorithmic discoveries need to happen and whether they're in reach for human understanding, or when we'd have the computational power to exploit such algorithms if discovered.
All we can really say is that it's theoretically possible, we're living proof of that. Also that there must be a lot of intelligent needles in the algorithmic haystack if evolution was able to stumble across one without a clear fitness mandate to do so (most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important). I'd probably bet on it being more a matter of "when?" than "if?", but I wouldn't make any assumptions about timescale other than "not this year, probably not next".
Whether or not it's likely we'll see AGI any time soon is, IMO, a matter of wild-ass-guessing more than anything else. There are no experts in AGI right now, only philosophers, because the field doesn't even exist. So nobody has any remotely educated guess about what algorithmic discoveries need to happen and whether they're in reach for human understanding, or when we'd have the computational power to exploit such algorithms if discovered.
All we can really say is that it's theoretically possible, we're living proof of that. Also that there must be a lot of intelligent needles in the algorithmic haystack if evolution was able to stumble across one without a clear fitness mandate to do so (most of the creatures that thrive don't have what we consider intelligence, so it's not that evolutionarily important). I'd probably bet on it being more a matter of "when?" than "if?", but I wouldn't make any assumptions about timescale other than "not this year, probably not next".