Comment by visarga

AI agents need environments with a complexity similar to that of our own in order to understand, and a goal to optimise on (humans have 'survival' as the goal). The missing link is that intelligence is dependent on environment and AI agents don't have rich enough environments yet, or a long enough evolution. The level of understanding is related to the complexity of the environment.

But that can be fixed in simulation. That's why most RL research (RL being the closest branch to AGI) is centered on games. Games are simple environments we can provide to the AI agents today. In the future I don't see why a virtual environment could not be realistic, and AI agents able to 'understand'.