I'm curious how close the research community is to general AI

Nobody knows, because we don't know how to do it yet. There could be a "big breakthrough" tomorrow that more or less finishes it out, or it could take 100 years, or - worst case - Penrose turns out to be right and it's not possible at all.

Also, are there useful books, courses or papers that go into general AI research?

Of course there are. See:

https://agi.mit.edu

https://agi.reddit.com

http://www.agi-society.org/

https://opencog.org/

https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...

https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...

https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-General-Intelligence-Cogni...

https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Artificial-Intelligence-Alg...

https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/0...

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Understanding-Creation-I...

https://www.amazon.com/Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657...

https://www.amazon.com/Unified-Theories-Cognition-William-Le...

https://www.amazon.com/Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning-Ma...

https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Bio...

https://www.amazon.com/Emotion-Machine-Commonsense-Artificia...

https://www.amazon.com/Physical-Universe-Oxford-Cognitive-Ar...

See also, the work on various "Cognitive Architectures", including SOAR, ACT-R, CLARION, etc,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture

"Neuvoevolution"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution

and "Biologically Inspired Computing"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biologically_inspired_computin...

To quote Pedro Domingos in "The Master Algorithm" [1]:

> But everyone has only a sliver of it [information about you]. Google sees your searches, Amazon your online purchases, AT&T your phone calls, Apple your music downloads, Safeway your groceries, Capital One your credit-card transactions. Companies like Acxiom collate and sell infor- mation about you, but if you inspect it (which in Acxiom’s case you can, at aboutthedata.com), it’s not much, and some of it is wrong. No one has anything even approaching a complete picture of you. That’s both good and bad. Good because if someone did, they’d have far too much power. Bad because as long as that’s the case there can be no 360-degree model of you. What you really want is a digital you that you’re the sole owner of and that others can access only on your terms.

Does this mean that effectively all of Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft will have the whole picture? That makes me worried.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning-Ma...

You may enjoy The Master Algorithm: http://www.amazon.com/Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning-Mac...

The author of this paper, Pedro Domingos[1], just wrote a book on machine learning titled The Master Algorithm[2]. In the book, he talks at length about the various elements that may serve as (part of) the basis for a "master algorithm" - a generalized learning algorithm capable of learning anything. Rule induction is one of the things he talks about in the book, so at least one expert seems to think this stuff is still relevant.

Of course, it might just be that this is his pet "thing" and for all I know he could be totally wrong, but it struck me as interesting enough to start doing some reading on. And hence this post.

[1]: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning...