+1 I agree with you. Even though friends like Ben Goertzel believe and work hard to create AGI, I think short and medium term the path to much better AI will be in assistive systems. I manage a small machine learning team at a large bank and I am an all-in believer that systems built with deep learning, probabilistic graph models, <fill in any master algorithm you want here>, etc. will fundamentally change the way knowledge workers work and transform society. This belief makes me excited to go into work every morning.

I love Douglas Hofstadter’s work and I think I own all of his books. I am not very academic in my outlook. I love technology for what it lets me build. Reading Hofstadter is like looking into the mind of someone with a very different world view from my own.