Having an agent with sensory and motor terminals in diverse contexts gradually trained on increasingly complex knowledge and tasks is key I believe. Like I mentioned see Deep Mind's work. Also see field of AGI which does exist (for example search 'AGI-16 intelligence' on youtube).
I am working on a webpage to try to break down why I think this is coming so fast.
AGI(-16) is a cognitive science / philosophy conference (and not particularly high impact). Similarly, NIPS is not really about neural information processing.
I'm not reading into titles. I watched a lot of the videos. Don't dismiss it on your superficial evaluation of titles or prejudice about the conference.
AGI is in fact a developed field with key insights into general intelligence. You should study it.
I comment a lot on machine learning but I don't actually work in the field actively. I did some research in college.
There aren't many active researchers/experts commenting on HN (better things to do), which is IMO a big issue with the ML-related discussion quality on HN (it's basically 90% futurism/speculation).
I am working on a webpage to try to break down why I think this is coming so fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP7vhBaBDyk&t=4589s General Reinforcement Learning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9eSVYLSSrs The Emotional Mechanisms in NARS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVrflIw6sGg&t=4056s AGI-15 Keynote by Jürgen Schmidhuber - The Deep Learning RNNaissance