1) No one knows what exactly makes humans "intelligent" and therefore 2) No one knows what it would take to achieve AGI
Go back through history and AI / AGI has been a couple of decades away for several decades now.
Aside from that the measure really, to me, has to be power efficiency. If you're boiling oceans to make all this work then you've not achieved anything worth having.
From my calculations the human brain runs on about 400 calories a day. That's an absurdly small amount of energy. This hints at the direction these technologies must move in to be truly competitive with humans.
We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.
I think this just displays an exceptionally low estimation of human beings. People tend to resist extremities. Violently.
> experience socially momentous change
The technology is owned and costs money to use. It has extremely limited availability to most of the world. It will be as "socially momentous" as every other first world exclusive invention has been over the past several decades. 3D movies were, for a time, "socially momentous."
> on the verge of self driving cars spreading to more cities.
Lidar can't read street lights and vision systems have all sorts of problems. You might be able to code an agent that can drive a car but you've got some other problems that stand in the way of this. AGI is like 1/8th the battle. I referenced just the brain above. Your eyes and ears are actually insanely powerful instruments in their own right. "Real world agency" is more complicated than people like to admit.
> We don't need very powerful AI to do very powerful things.
You've lost sight of the forest for the trees.
And more practically -- these cars are running in half a dozen cities already. Yes, there's room to go, but pretending there are 'fundamental gaps' to them achieving wider deployment is burying your head in the sand.