Machine learning and neural network have their place but they are custom made for one task. Current "AI" or llms and image generators have very few real use cases and does not justify their resource use plus they make money for mentally ill persons.

Also the unnecessary toil is very necessary, but that's philosophy.

Anyway due to some quantum laws there is a hard barrier on how small you can make transistors or else electrons will just pass through, and we're getting close to it, so we can't reach AGI that way