[ummm32]

Quite fair, but not 100% certain.

Almost nobody really knows how developed is the state-of-the-art theory / applied technology in confidentials advances that the usual suspects may have already achieved. I.E. deepmind, openai, baidu, nsa, etc.

AGI could have already been achieved - even theoretically - somewhere, and like when Edison got to make work a light bulb, we're still using oil and not knowing anything about electricity, or light bulbs or energy distribution networks / infrastructure.

The actual current - new, mostly unimplemented yet - technology level.

Back then you wouldn't have believed if someone had said you "hey, city nights in ten years won't be dark anymore"

[idlewords]

This is an AI equivalent of believing that the NSA has proved that P=NP and can read everyone's traffic.

There's no way to disprove it, but given that in the open literature people haven't even found a way to coherently frame the question of general AI, let alone theorize about it, it becomes just another form of magical thinking.

[ummm32]

You're partially right (because AGI really looks like VERY far away for the current status in theory publicly known), but it's not exactly like "magical thinking".

There are several public examples of radically more advanced theory/technology than the publicly known possible at a certain time/year, kept secret by governments / corps for a very long time (decades).

Lockheed achieved the blackbird decades before it was even admitted that a technology like that could even exist. But, looking backwards, it just looks like an "incremental" advance, but it wasn't, the engineering required to make fly the blackbird was revolutionary for the time when it was invented (back in the 50s / 60s ).

The Lockheed F-117 and its tech had a similar path, just somewhat admitted in late 80s (and this was 70s technology, probably based on theoretical concepts from the 60s).

More or less the same could be said about the tech in Blechtley Park: current tech / theory propelled to extraordinary capabilities by radical improvement achieved by new top secret advances in engineering. The hardware, events and advances ocurred in Bletchley Park were kept secret for years (I think just in the 50s they started to be carefully mentioned but not fully admitted, but nothing even close to the details currently found in the Wikipedia).

At any given time there could be a lot of theory/technology jump-aheads being achieved out there, several decades ahead of the publicly published/known, supposedly current, theory/technology.