As my username implies, arguably the race to AGI has already been won with the ghost.pl AI that thinks in English and in Russian, and with the MindForth AI of which one version thinks in English and another thinks in German. However, the full implications of winning the AGI race will not be clear until other AGI parties improve upon the AI Mind Modules:
No. It is just around the corner because I am coding the same AI Mind in both Forth for humanoid robots and in Perl for webservers. If I can get high school students and college students to show other people how the AI thinks, they might either improve upon my AI code or write their own AI from scratch based on the theory of how the mind works. I am taking measures to get my AI theory and code evaluated by competing entities on the level of individuals, schools, corporations, and even nations -- because the AI Minds think in English, German and Russian. By approaching various AI communities, such as OpenCog and Numenta, I spread the memes of free-of-charge open-source artificial intelligence.
> At the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, IBM demonstrated its “Shoebox“ machine. It could understand 16 English words and was designed to be primarily a voice calculator. In the ensuing years there were hundreds of advancements.
As a teenager, I was there at that IBM exhibit demonstrating speech recognition at the Seattle World's Fair. The IBM engineers let me speak into the microphone to see how well the machine could recognize English words. The IBM engineers were very apologetic because the machine had difficulty recognizing the word "five" -- they made me pronounce it very slowly and with emphasis on the "V" sound. Ah, the Seattle World's Fair! I went to the Berlin exhibit and practiced the German that I was teaching myself out of a textbook. President-to-be Richard Nixon gave me his autograph on a scrap of paper but I lost it the same day. Anyway, I went on to create the Ghost free Open-Source artificial intelligence in Perl that speaks English and Russian over the keyboard and screen, but the AI source code desperately needs to be outfitted with acoustic speech input and loudspeaker output. Maybe if this new Perl Strong AI gets adopted by some major AI outfits, they will work on the Speech input and output.
Artificial Intelligence in German is the best book on Singularity because it is causing the Singularity.
First it took me thirteen years as an independent scholar to develop the Theory of Mind for AI -- most of it tumbling out of me onto paper in the final year or two of theorizing. But my theory was repeatedly rejected for publication, and my AI work languished over a ten-year gap. Finally I started programming Mind.REXX AI in 1993. People asked me to port it to Forth, so I created MindForth and later a JavaScript tutorial version. In recent years I ported the English AI Minds into German and Russian. But the process proceeds erratically rather than day-by-day as if it were a nine-to-five job. Sometimes a great notion impels one to code AI immediately, as when I got the idea for InFerence on 17 December 2012. I also like to document my work while I am coding. I often back off from my AI work for a while until I see clearly what needs to be done next, and then I go into a frenzy of new AI coding. Thanks for asking.
Such a scenario of AI rampancy is now playing out in real life.
http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00GX2B8F0 shows the spread of AI memes at just one hotspot around the world.
Artificial Intelligence in German is actually about the transhuminist theme of AI in general and 18 out of 20 chapters can be read for free in the preview. The all-but-free e-book is available in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, [Italy](http://www.amazon.it/dp/B00GX2B8F00, Japan, Mexico,SpainUnited Kingdom and the United States. Disclaimer: I wrote it.
You have written a very insightful essay, which is in need of only a few minor corrections. "Norbert Weiner"should be Norbert Wiener. "Another phenomena" should be "Another phenomenon" in the singular. "...was waning" should be "were waning" in the plural. Besides OpenCog among AGI projects, there is also the http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/Mind.Forth project in English, which has spawned the http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/Wotan project of Artificial Intelligence in German.