For a straw position at the opposite extreme, consider: "I just don't believe you can solve logical Tic-Tac-Toe without some deep algorithm that's general enough to do anything a human can. There's no safe way to get an AI that can play Tic-Tac-Toe without doing things dangerous enough to require solving [41k all of AI alignment.alignment. Beware the cognitive biases that lead you to underestimate how much deep cognitive labor is held in common between tasks that merely appear different on the surface!"
To which we reply, "Contrary to some serious predictions, it turned out to be possible to play superhuman Go without a general AI, never mind Tic-Tac-Toe. Sometimes there really are specialized ways of doing things, the end."
Although humans share 95% of their DNA with chimpanzees, and have brains only three times as large as chimpanzee brains, humans appear to be far better than chimpanzees at learning an enormous variety of cognitive domains. A bee is born with the ability to construct hives; a beaver is born with an instinct for building dams; a human looks at both and imagines a gigantic dam with a honeycomb structure of internal reinforcement. Arguendo, some set of factors, present in human brains but not in chimpanzee brains, seem to sum to a central cognitive capability that lets humans learn a huge variety of different domains without those domains being specifically preprogrammed as instincts.
This very-widely-applicable cognitive capacity is termed general intelligence (by most AI researchers explicitly talking about it; the term isn't universally accepted as yet).
More specific hypotheses about how general intelligence operates have been advanced at various points, but any corresponding attempts to define general intelligence that way, would be theory-laden. The pretheoretical phenomenon to be explained is the extraordinary variety of human achievements across many non-instinctual learned domains, compared to other animals.
The following confusions of definition should also be avoided:
Since we only know about one organism with this 'general' or 'significantly more generally applicable than chimpanzee cognition' intelligence, this capability is sometimes identified with humanity, and consequently with our overall level of cognitive ability.
We do not, however, know that "cognitive ability that works on a very wide variety of problems" and "overall humanish levels of performance" need to go together across much wider differences of mind design.
Humans evolved incrementally out of earlier hominids by blind processes of natural selection; evolution wasn't trying to design a human on purpose. Because of the way we evolved incrementally, all neurotypical humans have specialized evolved capabilities like 'walking' and 'running' and 'throwing stones' and 'outwitting other humans'. We have all the primate capabilities and all the hominid capabilities as well as whatever is strictly necessary for general intelligence.
So, for all we know at this point, there could be some way to get a 'significantly more general than chimpanzee cognition' intelligence, in the equivalent of a weaker mind than a human brain. E.g., due to leaving out some of the special support we evolved to run, throw stones, and outwit other minds. We might at some point consistently see an infrahuman general intelligence that is not like a disabled human, but rather like some previously unobserved and unimagined form of weaker but still highly general intelligence.
Since the concepts of 'general intelligence' and 'roughly par-human intelligence' come apart in theory and possibly also in practice, we should avoid speaking of Artificial...
E.g. in the sense of having lower sample complexity and hence being able to derive correct answers using fewer observations than humans trying to do the same over relatively short periods of time.
It seems conceptually possible to believe, though this belief has not been observed in the wild, that self-programming minds have something worthy of being called 'general intelligence' but that human brains don't.
Although humans share 95% of their DNA with chimpanzees, and have brains only three times as large as chimpanzee brains, humans appear to be far better than chimpanzees at learning an enormous variety of cognitive domains. A bee is born with the ability to construct hives; a beaver is born with an instinct for building dams; a human looks at both and imagines a gigantic dam with a honeycomb structure of internal reinforcement. Arguendo, some set of factors, present in human brains but not in chimpanzee brains, seem to sum to a central cognitive capability that lets humans learn a huge variety of different domains without those domains being specifically preprogrammed as instincts.
This very-widely-applicable cognitive capacity is termed general intelligence (by most AI researchers explicitly talking about it; the term isn't universally accepted as yet).
More specific hypotheses about how general intelligence operates have been advanced at various points, but any corresponding attempts to define general intelligence that way, would be theory-laden. The pretheoretical phenomenon to be explained is the extraordinary variety of human achievements across many non-instinctual learned domains, compared to other animals.
The following confusions of definition should also be avoided:
Since we only know about one organism with this 'general' or 'significantly more generally applicable than chimpanzee cognition' intelligence, this capability is sometimes identified with humanity, and consequently with our overall level of cognitive ability.
We do not, however, know that "cognitive ability that works on a very wide variety of problems" and "overall humanish levels of performance" need to go together across much wider differences of mind design.
Humans evolved incrementally out of earlier hominids by blind processes of natural selection; evolution wasn't trying to design a human on purpose. Because of the way we evolved incrementally, all neurotypical humans have specialized evolved capabilities like 'walking' and 'running' and 'throwing stones' and 'outwitting other humans'. We have all the primate capabilities and all the hominid capabilities as well as whatever is strictly necessary for general intelligence.
So, for all we know at this point, there could be some way to get a 'significantly more general than chimpanzee cognition' intelligence, in the equivalent of a weaker mind than a human brain. E.g., due to leaving out some of the special support we evolved to run, throw stones, and outwit other minds. We might at some point consistently see an infrahuman general intelligence that is not like a disabled human, but rather like some previously unobserved and unimagined form of weaker but still highly general intelligence.
Since the concepts of 'general intelligence' and 'roughly par-human intelligence' come apart in theory and possibly also in practice, we should avoid speaking of Artificial...
The following confusions of definition should also be avoided:
Arguably, these factual questions have in common that they revolve about the distance between different cognitive domains-domains--given a natural design for an agent that can do X, how close is it in design space to an agent that can do Y? Is it 'blue'driving blue cars vs. driving red cars' or 'Tic-Tac-Toe vs. classifying pictures of cats'?
We are not perfectly general - we have an easier time learning to walk than learning to do abstract calculus, even though the latter is much easier in an objective sense. But we're sufficiently general that we can figure out Special Relativity and engineer skyscrapers despite our not having those abilities built-in at compile time (i.e., at birth). An Artificial General Intelligence would have the same property; it could learn a tremendous variety of domains, including domains it had no inkling of when it was switched on.
More specific hypotheses about how general intelligence operates have been advanced at various points, but any corresponding attempts to define general intelligence that way, would be theory-laden. The pretheoretical phenomenon to be explained is the extraordinary variety of human achievements across many non-instinctual learned domains, compared to other animals.
The following confusions of definition should be avoided:
Although humans share 95% of their DNA with chimpanzees, and have brains only three times as large as chimpanzee brains, humans appear to be far better than chimpanzees at learning an enormous variety of cognitive domains. A bee is born with the ability to construct hives; a beaver is born with an instinct for building dams; a human looks at both and imagines a gigantic dam with a honeycomb structure of internal reinforcement. Arguendo, some set of factors, present in human brains but not in chimpanzee brains, seem to sum to a central cognitive capability that lets humans learn a huge variety of different domains without those domains being specifically preprogrammed as instincts.
This very-widely-applicable cognitive capacity is termed general intelligence (by most AI researchers explicitly talking about it; the term isn't universally accepted as yet).
More specific hypotheses about how general intelligence operates have been advanced at various points, but any corresponding attempts to define general intelligence that way, would be theory-laden. The pretheoretical phenomenon to be explained is the extraordinary variety of human achievements across many non-instinctual learned domains, compared to other animals.
The following confusions of definition should also be avoided:
Since we only know about one organism with this 'general' or 'significantly more generally applicable than chimpanzee cognition' intelligence, this capability is sometimes identified with humanity, and consequently with our overall level of cognitive ability.
We do not, however, know that "cognitive ability that works on a very wide variety of problems" and "overall humanish levels of performance" need to go together across much wider differences of mind design.
Humans evolved incrementally out of earlier hominids by blind processes of natural selection; evolution wasn't trying to design a human on purpose. Because of the way we evolved incrementally, all neurotypical humans have specialized evolved capabilities like 'walking' and 'running' and 'throwing stones' and 'outwitting other humans'. We have all the primate capabilities and all the hominid capabilities as well as whatever is strictly necessary for general intelligence.
So, for all we know at this point, there could be some way to get a 'significantly more general than chimpanzee cognition' intelligence, in the equivalent of a weaker mind than a human brain. E.g., due to leaving out some of the special support we evolved to run, throw stones, and outwit other minds. We might at some point consistently see an infrahuman general intelligence that is not like a disabled human, but rather like some previously unobserved and unimagined form of weaker but still highly general intelligence.
Since the concepts of 'general intelligence' and 'roughly par-human intelligence' come apart in theory and possibly also in practice, we should avoid speaking of Artificial...