How Can the Current State of AI Guide Future Conversations of General Intelligence?

Abstract

Similar to the field of human intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced a long history of advances and controversies regarding its definition, assessment, and application. Starting over 70 years ago, AI set out to achieve a single, general-purpose technology that could overcome many tasks in a similar fashion to humans. However, until recently, implementations were based on narrowly defined tasks, making the systems inapplicable to even slight variations of the same task. With recent advances towards more generality, the contemplation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) akin to human general intelligence (HGI) can no longer be easily dismissed. We follow this line of inquiry and outline some of the key questions and conceptual challenges that must be addressed in order to integrate AGI and HGI and to enable future progress towards a unified field of general intelligence.