To each their own. While impressive I do not find it inspiring. Instead, working on strong AI is, in my mind, the ultimate challenge. Far more amazing by any measure than anything we have acomplished so far.
Who is to say the data requirements of an AGI won't be massive? Figuring out efficient 50PB sorts might just be a required step.
Even if it isn't, it's unreasonable to expect the world to stop spinning in the interim.
If a superintelligent AGI is born tomorrow, it might just establish itself as a singleton, prohibit other AGIs from exisiting, and then take an indefinite vacation. If that happens, we'll continue to work on seemingly mundane, non-important problems (such as this one) for humanity's foreseeable future.
Don't forget that Google owns DeepMind. If there was a way to divine who's closest to AGI at the present time, the answer would probably be them (even if arrival is ultimately far off).
working on strong AI is, in my mind, the ultimate challenge.
So is working on antigravity, free energy, and backwards time travel, but people don't do that because they are no reasonable approaches we can try.
Glorifying "AI AI AI" is silly because — there are no approaches we can try. Sure, we can identify ten million images per second, but none of that involves the least bit of "thinking."
Emotions are not a requirement for strong AI. I frankly would not waste any time with them. I just need an AI that can learn and solve problems at the human level.
I'm not naive enough to think that it can be solved in a short time. I do think that it is worth it for a person to spend the rest of their life working on it. There is just nothing more exciting than AI in my opinion.
"Narrow" AI is already here: search, banking, insurance, internet ads, crime prediction, Siri, plane autopilot (autotakeoff/landing too), autoparking, driver assist, on and on.
(At Trimble, we had fully autonomous tractor PoC in 2001)
"Deep" AI (self-directed / human-interactive) will take more time and effort, and can have (simulated) emotions if so programmed; the determinate is how to sell such as a viable product or service that doesn't freak people out too much or do something stupid like place untrustworthy systems in charge of live nuclear missiles.
Deep AI already started with deep learning, which improves exponentially every year, if you look at the performances. It already freaks me out that you can put together cheap drones+guns+self driving+better-than-human level face detection. Imagine controlling a drone botnet...