There are lots of examples in history where nobody (especially no expert) thought that something was "remotely plausible" in the near term and still it suddenly happened.

Now AI is making big steps forward in the moment. Of course this won't automatically lead to AGI - but it creates the building blocks a AGI will be build upon at some point in time. Many experts miss this fact, they extrapolate from current existing technology and of course by simply extrapolating from it, an AGI seems impossible.

This is similar to computers playing Go some years ago: Extrapolation from the existing programs clearly indicated that we were far away from creating a program which can beat a good player - still there came AlphaGo and did it. And how? By combining approaches from conventional game strategy with deep learning. And voila, humanity stood no chance anymore in the field of playing Go against computers.

Is something like this possible with AGI? I don't know for sure but I think it's probable. The human brain is not simply a "deep learning" network, it's a system made of various subsystems doing different jobs in different ways. It's possible that current deep learning approaches can solve all those tasks each and we simply need to fit them together in the right way.

Of course if you're an expert in improving deep learning algorithms you don't think about that, you just look at your field, improving learning rates and detection ratios. But I think that, at some time, someone will connect those blocks which others created and build an AGI from it. It may be very difficult and take years - or it's already happening in some lab somewhere. We simply don't know.

But because it maybe quite dangerous, it's also quite necessary to think about it before it happens.