Sci-fi predicted parades when AI passed the Turing test, but in reality, it happened with models like GPT-3.5 and the world barely noticed. This reveals humanity's incredible ability to quickly normalize profound technological leaps and simply move the goalposts for what feels revolutionary.

Sam Harris notes the irony that AIs like ChatGPT are so superhumanly capable—answering complex queries in seconds—that they immediately reveal they aren't human. The long-anticipated milestone of passing the Turing test became obsolete the moment it was achieved.

The pursuit of AGI may mirror the history of the Turing Test. Once ChatGPT clearly passed the test, the milestone was dismissed as unimportant. Similarly, as AI achieves what we now call AGI, society will likely move the goalposts and decide our original definition was never the true measure of intelligence.

Hinton frames the arrival of intelligent AI as the latest in a series of historical demotions for humanity, following Copernicus (we're not the center of the universe) and Darwin (we're just animals). We are now forced to accept that intelligence isn't exclusively biological.

As AI achieves impressive milestones, like assisting in creating a cancer vaccine, the public conversation immediately discounts the achievement. The goalposts shift from "AI helped solve a problem" to demanding a fully autonomous, one-shot solution. This pattern of escalating expectations obscures the real, incremental progress being made.

Many people's last experience with AI was with early ChatGPT in 2023, which was prone to errors. The rapid advancement of models like Claude is creating a shockwave, forcing a re-evaluation of AI's disruptive potential, similar to the societal shifts seen during major technological revolutions.

From electricity (seen as demonic) to the atomic bomb, humanity has always demonized transformative technologies. Yet, we adapt and integrate them. The current cynicism about AI fails to account for this proven track record of human resilience and problem-solving.

Our brains are wired to treat entities that look and sound human as people. As AI becomes more convincing, our innate psychological responses will take over, making most people lose interest in the philosophical question of whether the AI is 'truly' conscious and simply treat it as such.

Artificial General Intelligence—AI surpassing humans in most tasks—will be a gradual process, not a sudden, announced moment. It will "sneak in on us" as capabilities incrementally improve, without a clear before-and-after societal shift.