NLP, heuristics, logic gates (OR XOR, etc), neural nets, decision trees, markov chains, deep learning will only take you so far… (I spent decades following these avenues) you will be able to roughly simulate certain facets of an AGI, and for some applications this is enough. (some excellent chatbots though:)
But just think about a simple word like ‘up’. You can link it to as many words, sentences and concept trees as you like but the machine will never truly understand the concept/ direction/ (points up) as we do. If a machine can’t grasp a simple concept like this then how is it to process complex human nuances, emotional states and words/ concepts like ambiguity? If I was to trace a letter of the alphabet on your back and upside down you would still easily tell what it was… how the f%^& lol.
As mentioned above, Cuttlefish, Octopus and numerous other animals exhibit intelligence without a human like cortex/ brain structure, so we must be missing something radical.
What if just neurons aren’t the answer, what about supporting cells (glial, etc), what if they don’t work the way the main stream thinks they do, what about the connectome/ structure, white matter, what’s myelin all about? Why do we dream? Split personalities?, Neurological diseases like epilepsy. In what ways are we similar to other animals that exhibit intelligence? (There must be a connection/ trait/ underlying process/ similarity) These and a million more are all facets of the workings of a machine; we need to back engineer the machine from its output to discern its workings.
Modern computers and languages are useless for creating a true AGI, the architecture and binary logic was never designed for the task… but… they are perfect for simulating other systems.
I believe the trick is to simulate a neurological processor that can then run its own specialised languages (like an emulator can reproduce the old 8086 cpu and instruction set). With this approach you’re not limited by logic and constructs, you can design your processor/ cortex to do anything you like.
If a structure/ machine can learn anything… it can learn to be human and intelligent.