Is AGI the Northwest Passage?

I’m reading Bernard DeVoto’s The Course of Empire, a history of how Europeans came to understand North America. Mostly it is a history of how they misunderstood it.

For nearly three centuries, they kept believing a water route ran through the continent to the Pacific, and beyond it to the trade of Asia.

Governments and trading companies paid for expedition after expedition to find it. As late as 1803, US President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west to look for “the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent.”

Two years later, Lewis climbed to the Continental Divide expecting to look down on a river route to the Pacific. He saw mountains, range after range, with snow on them in August. The passage wasn’t there. It never had been.

The search wasn’t wasted. It mapped the rivers and built the trading networks. But the money was made in fur, a far humbler business than the trade of Asia.

This got me thinking about the AI buildout. Hundreds of billions of dollars are going into chips, data centers and power, and the companies leading it say the destination is AGI.

So is AGI our Northwest Passage: a destination that justifies the spending only if it’s really there?

And if it is, what’s the fur?