I agree with this up till saying we must be very far from AGI. I don't think we're close, but the scale of human inputs doesn't tell us anything about it. A useful AGI need not be capable of human level cognition, and human level cognition need not require the entire human biological or nervous systems - we're a product of millions of years of undirected random evolution, optimized to run a fleshy body and survive African plains predators. This whole thing we do of thinking and science and engineering is a quirk that made us very adaptable, but how much of what we are is required to implement it isn't clear (i.e. a human minus a hand can still understand advanced mathematics, there are blind programmers etc.)
Sure, but there are animals with much larger brains on Earth which have - we believe - a reasonably high level of cognition but have not achieved the technological and engineering feats which we have (i.e. dolphins, whales, elephants as naive examples based on brain mass and complexity).
Conversely you have birds - with much smaller brains - which also don't achieve those things but display advanced language skills, have apparent societal structure and despite our inability to understand it seem to have enough language to communicate advanced concepts.
You are absolutely correct. There are multiple algorithmic advances required in addition to hardware advances.
Parrots have hundreds of millions to a few billion neurons, which are just as much parallel-local state-proceasing units as the ones in the mammalian brain. We haven't done a great job of simulating a ~300 neuron c. elegans worm. Not that simulation is required for equivalent intelligence. I'm just saying these analog machines are much much more complex and powerful than the average AI aficionado gives credit. So complex that we are nowhere near AGI.
