[dasboth]

There is research directly addressing "transfer learning" where the goal is to have more general learning agents. I don't know how advanced it is, but it's certainly not advanced enough to become anything close to an AGI by 2018.

Ultimately I think there are far more pressing issues in AI around ethics, bias, or security. It's great that there are philosophers who can sit around and worry about a possible distant future (and I think as thought exercises they're fascinating), but it's not what most people in the field should be concerned with.