Well said, Adam. This is exactly what the paper "Facts and Anomalies to Keep in Perspective When Designing an Artificial Intelligence" speaks about too. We need to focus more on coming up with a different set of ideas that start right from the fundamentals. Long ago, when the wrong brothers made futile attempts at planes that didn't fly (and the Press said that humans won't fly for another million years), the Wright brothers took a different path to finally build a plane that actually flew. Contemporary research in AI is built on concepts that do not actually delve into what constitutes "intelligence". Sure, there is a lot of impressive functionality built using ML algorithms, but anyone worth their salt knows the algorithms aren't intelligent. However, it would be good to shift focus on few things:

1. Overhauling academia to equip it with a greater vision for research, rather than allowing capitalist needs or group-think to take priority.

2. Going into much greater detail to understand what intelligence actually is. It's not necessary to emulate biological intelligence though. If we focused on building planes that flapped wings like birds...