How confident should we be that general AI involves solely hard work on existing problems like performing inductive inference?

I didn't really claim that. There's also the whole issue of what utility function to use - and some other things as well - tree pruning strategies, for instance. Just that inductive inference is the key technology for the technical side of the problem - the part not to do with values.

Much has been written about the link between induction and intelligence: Hutter. Mahoney. Me.