>Extrapolating from the last few years’ progress, it is enticing to believe that Deep Artificial General Intelligence is just around the corner and just a few more architectural tricks, bigger data sets and faster computing power are required to take us there. I feel that there are a couple of solid reasons to be much more skeptical.
The next step would may be to wire the things together in a similar structure to the human brain which is kind of what Deep Mind are working on - they are trying to do the hippocampus at the moment. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be...)
On the other hand there are reasons to be optimistic. Human brains are built from networks of neurons and the artificial neural networks are starting to have quite similar characteristics to components of the brain - things like image recognition (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325) and Deep Mind playing Atari (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-02/25/google-deepmi...)
The next step would may be to wire the things together in a similar structure to the human brain which is kind of what Deep Mind are working on - they are trying to do the hippocampus at the moment. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0&feature=youtu.be...)
Also we are approaching the point where reasonably priced hardware can match the brain, roughly the 2020s (http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm)
It'll be interesting to see how it goes.