We have natural “general” intelligence which appears to be generated by boring old chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. Why wouldn’t we be able to recreate that at some (IMO very far) point?
More than that: we have literally billions of examples of human-level intelligence right here on Earth. We have not a single example of teleportation, time travel, FTL, and other staples of not-very-science fiction.
Think about how difficult it would be to make a fly from scratch. Not editing the genes of an existing organism, but combining the raw chemical components into a form that's identical to a fly.
There are trillions of examples of insects on earth, but they do us no good when it comes to building one without using an evolved framework.
We've created a great number of things that had no natural analog. The internet, space travel, etc. I'd say our odds of doing something we haven't seen before are about even with artificially recreating a lot of things we see every day
What we have is a fairly loose mix of categorisers and recognisers, biochemical motivators and goal systems, some abstraction, and a lot of externally persistent cultural and social programming. (The extent and importance of which is wildly underestimated.)
The result is that virtually all humans can handle emotional recognition and display with speech and body language including facial manipulation/recognition. But this doesn't get you very far, except as a baseline for mutual recognition.
After that you get two narrowing pyramids of talent and trained ability. One starts with basic physical manipulation of concrete objects and peaks in the extreme abstraction of physics and math research. The other starts from social and emotional game playing, with a side order of resource control and acquisition. And peaks in the extreme game playing of political and economic systems.
So what's called AI is a very partial and limited attempt to start climbing one of those peaks. The other is being explored in covert collective form on social media. And it's far more dangerous than a hypothetical paperclip monster, because it can affect what we think, feel, and believe, not just what we can do.
The point is that it's a default assumption that the point of AI is to create something that is somehow recognisable as a human individual, no matter how remotely.
But it's far more likely to be a kind of collective presence which doesn't just lack a face, it won't be perceived as a presence or influence at all.
Can you recreate all phenomena computationally? Could you replace the antenna of your radio or mobile phone with a special CPU? Could you bomb a country with CPUs? I don't think so.
A warp drive is theoretically possible, and also driven by boring chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. humans may create one of those at some very far point in the future, too
> and also driven by boring chemical/thermal/electrical interactions.
Implausible exotic matter, negative energy, etc, are usually prerequisites.
Just like the existence of flying birds were a hint that flying machines might be possible, the existence of thinking creatures is a hint that thinking machines might be possible.
Guess what is more likely to be implemented.