Sparked by progress in Large Language Models (LLMs), there’s a lot of chatter recently about AGI, its timelines, and what it might look like. Some of it is hopeful and optimistic, but a lot of it is fearful and doomy, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, a lot of it is also very abstract, which causes people to speak past each other in circles. Therefore, I’m always on a lookout for concrete analogies and historical precedents that can help explore the topic in more grounded terms. In particular, wh...