Essentials of General Intelligence: The Direct Path to Artificial General Intelligence

9 Conclusion

Understanding general intelligence and identifying its essential components are key to building next-generation AI systems — systems that are far less expensive, yet significantly more capable. In addition to concentrating on general learning abilities, a fast-track approach should also seek a path of least resistance — one that capitalizes on human engineering strengths and available technology. Sometimes, this involves selecting the AI road less traveled.

I believe that the theoretical model, cognitive components, and framework described above, joined with my other strategic design decisions provide a solid basis for achieving practical AGI capabilities in the foreseeable future. Successful implementation will significantly address many traditional problems of AI. Potential benefits include:

• minimizing initial environment-specific programming (through self-adaptive configuration);

• substantially reducing ongoing software changes, because a large amount of additional functionality and knowledge will be acquired autonomously via self-supervised learning;

• greatly increasing the scope of applications, as users teach and train additional capabilities; and

• improved flexibility and robustness resulting from systems’ ability to adapt to changing data patterns, environments and goals.

AGI promises to make an important contribution toward realizing software and robotic systems that are more usable, intelligent, and human-friendly. The time seems ripe for a major initiative down this new path of human advancement that is now open to us.