Over the past few months, some of the most prominent people in AI have fashioned themselves as modern messiahs and their products as deities. Top executives and respected researchers at the world’s biggest tech companies, including a recent Nobel laureate, are all at once insisting that superintelligent software is just around the corner, going so far as to provide timelines: They will build it within six years, or four years, or maybe just two.Although AI executives commonly speak of the coming AGI revolution—referring to artificial “general” intelligence that rivals or…
