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by toasterlovin 2734 days ago
Not to mention that we don't even know if general intelligence exists. All we know is that mental abilities tend to correlate, but not why they tend to correlate. And if you think about designing machines, in general, the idea of general intelligence is utterly ridiculous. Does a fast car have general speediness? Of course not, it has dozens or hundreds of discrete optimizations that all contribute in some degree to the car being faster.
2 comments
mac01021 2734 days ago
I'm not sure you and the OP mean the same thing by "General Intelligence".

It seems clear that autonomous systems which can apply their computational machinery to a diverse range of problems, and can, in a diverse range of settings, formulate instrumental goals as part of a plan to attain a final goal, do exist.

Because that's what humans are, at least some of the time.

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mannykannot 2734 days ago
But if human performance in these regards never exceeded what the pinnacle of today's AI performance is, we would not regard them as intelligent in a general sense, either.
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darkmighty 2734 days ago
Well, we have general purpose processors. You can prove they can run any algorithm you want (i.e. are Turing complete), but also, for practical problems (i.e. the ones encountered in engineering solutions in our planet and in our universe), they give reasonable max-min performance. Analogously I don't think 'AGI' is entirely useless -- you'd expect an AGI to have some properties like being able to solve reasonably well problems found in nature and society, maybe have a motivational framework distinguishing it as a separate entity, some knowledge about the world, etc.

edit: In terms of Turing-completeness analogues, the best candidate for AGI I think would be simply brute force capability: can this agent try all possible solutions until it solves this problem? (obviously using a heuristic to prioritize) -- that is, it'd employ a form of Universal Search[1] (aka Levin Search). Humans don't necessarily pass this test rigorously because we'd always get bored with a problem and because we have finite memory. But then CPUs are not truly Turing complete either (it's "just" a good model).

[1] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Universal_search

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