[Jensson]

> How come the goal posts for AGI are always the best of what people can do?

Not the best, I just want it to be able to do what average professionals can do because average humans can become average professionals in most fields.

> I can't diagnose anyone, yet I have GI.

You can learn to, an AGI system should be able to learn to as well. And since we can copy AGI learning it means that if it hasn't learned to diagnose people yet then it probably isn't an AGI, because an AGI should be able to learn that without humans changing its code and once it learned it once we copy it forever and now the entire AGI knows how to do it.

So, the AGI should be able to do all the things you could do if we include all versions of you that learned different fields. If the AGI can't do that then you are more intelligent than it in those areas, even if the singular you isn't better at those things than it is.

For these reasons it makes more sense to compare an AGI to humanity rather than individual humans, because for an AGI there is no such thing as "individuals", at least not the way we make AI today.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

People with severe Alzheimer's cannot learn, but still have general intelligence.

[Jensson]

If they can't learn then they don't have general intelligence, without learning there are many problems you wont be able to solve that average (or even very dumb) people can solve.

Learning is a core part to general intelligence, as general intelligence implies you can learn about new problems so you can solve those. Take away that and you are no longer a general problem solver.

[Zambyte]

That's a really good point. I want to define what I think of intelligence as being so we are on the same page: it is the combination of knowledge and reason. An example of a system with high knowledge amd low reason is Wikipedia. An example of a system with high reason and low knowledge is a scientific calculator. A highly intelligent system exhibits aspects of both.

A rule based expert intelligence system can be highly intelligent, but it is not general, and maybe no arrangement of rules could make one that is general. A general intelligence system must be able to learn and adapt to foreign problems, parameters, and goals dynamically.

[Jensson]

Yes, I think that makes sense, you can be intelligent without being generally intelligent. For some definitions the person with Alzheimer can be more intelligent than someone without, but the person without is more general intelligent thanks to ability to learn.

The classical example of a general intelligent task is to get the rules for a new game and then play it adequately, there are AI contests for that. That is easy for humans to do, games are enjoyed even by dumb people, but we have yet to make an AI that can play arbitrary games as well as even dumb humans.

Note that LLMs are more general than previous AI's thanks to in context learning, so we are making progress, but still far from as general as humans are.