Human-level artificial general intelligence and the possibility of a technological singularity: A reaction to Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, and McDermott's critique of Kurzweil

The AI field started out with grand dreams of human-level artificial general intelligence. During the last half-century, enthusiasm for these grand AI dreams – both within the AI profession and in society at large -has risen and fallen repeatedly, each time with a similar pattern of high hopes and media hype followed by overall disappointment. Throughout these fluctuations, though, research and development have steadily advanced on various fronts within AI and allied disciplines. Averaging across the various historical fluctuations, we may generalize that the original vision of human-level AI has been dampened over time due to various coupled factors, including most prominently