Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
Background: I did AI and Philosophy of Mind in undergrad, an MSc focused on ALife, then a PhD at Yale under a Macarthur Fellow who developed the theoretical framework for the 'evolution of Evolvability' where I worked on computational evolutionary biology. I can say we're not going to blindly brute force our way forward, but instead we'll need to reverse engineer nature's core algorithms to generate hard AI. Every time a major advance is made in AI the computational neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!". Those ingredients will be embodiment, evolution, genetics (genotype-phenotype encoding), neirogenesis(gene regulatory networks directing phenotypic development from a single cell to a multicellular neural network), and ecology (evolving in adversarial and cooperative environments). And we'll need a lot of theoretical work in how to represent nature's algorithms in code. For example my PhD work just focused on how to use evolutionary algorithms to evolve simple gene regulatory networks and how that leads to properties of modularity in the genotype-phenotype map. That alone is life's work but a necessary ingredient. I don't expect to see this solved in my lifetime given how we're attacking the problem (head on) today. And until then we're going to continue to run into these dark winters of AI.