I agree with all of this. But the definition of outrageous is subjective. Is it more outrageous to claim that we're on a smooth path to AGI, or to claim that we will suddenly hit a brick wall, when progress has appeared to readily accelerate in recent years? You have to get into the details to decide. I'd say Marcus and co. are about half right. But the reasons are too complex to state here.

What exactly spurred your post, something specific?

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>I was looking for a more low-brow sub than r/machinelearning to talk about philosophical implications of AGI/singularity.

I would say this is a decent place for that. You just circumnavigate the posts/comments you don't feel are worth discussion. I almost never directly discuss about an upcoming singularity. The date we may reach a point of a technological singularity doesn't really matter, you can easily discuss the implications. A lot of people here are optimistic of the outcome, but there's plenty of people that are concerned about it too.

Personally I usually discuss the next few years with job automation because that's more tangible to me right now. The implications of LLM's and possible short-term upcoming advances are alarming enough I don't really even think about more than 10+ years away in AI.

There are good articles on lesswrong that analyze why AGI is something that is coming at exponential rate. My background is psychology, and even in my field last 5 years mentioned topics like machine emotional intelligence and how to apply it, work with it and adapt to humans.