I've been involved a lot in working on my artistic career some months ago, but recently I've been turning on the research thread again - joined AGI mail list to notice the community there about the two AGI university courses taught in Plovdiv, and started to spend some time in AGI studies and reflection.
A comment of mine on Narrow AI-niks, in an Ben Goertzel article on "AI Nanny".
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/08/17/does-humanity-need-an-ai-nanny/
Matthew: Ben, I respect the opinion of AGI experts but because I have no programming expertise, I find it hard to ignore the plurality of “narrow” AI experts who believe AGI is not coming for a century of maybe never."
Todor: AGI is not about programming (unlike the AI-niks think) - it's about understanding how mind works. Programming would be the easiest part, once we do understand intelligence.
Plurality is not a strong argument - the majority of a population is supposed to have the minority of intelligence, and people who stick to the mainstream often are not "right", they're just obedient and narrow-viewed, have no own vision, and no guts to do anything radical on their own.
Regarding understanding - the boring narrow AI-niks are not trying to understand intelligence (they don't believe they could), rather they're coding and engineering on problems, which seem intelligent, but are obviously quite solvable and flat, just need some "tinkering" and testing to get done. Such as self-driving cars etc., which is one of the best achievement of the top narrow AI-niks.