The road to Superintelligence may have shortened

Tony Czarnecki, Sustensis

London 1/12/2023

Image generated by DALL-E

For an average person, just the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be quite confusing, as it seems to cover all aspects of what seems to be ‘unnatural’. It may start in difficulty to differentiate between Information Technology (IT) and AI.

IT processes information based on strictly defined rules, generally requiring all input data, although there are some heuristic systems that can operate without all data being available. However, AI can produce results based on partially available input data, as it operates similarly to a human mind — using probabilities. It can also learn from experience. Therefore, the same input data may not always produce the same output. The learning experience is what makes some humanoid robots resemble humans — they make errors, but progressively fewer than humans. To make matters even more confusing, many people, including myself, use the term AI as a general descriptor for all types of AI.

What we have now are individual, relatively unsophisticated AI assistants, chatbots such as ChatGPT, or robots. This is generally referred to as Artificial Narrow Intelligence, which is mostly defined as follows:

ARTIFICIAL NARROW INTELLIGENCE (ANI) can exceed human intelligence and capabilities in a single area

These could be games, including poker, which require some intuition, smelling, tasting, or face recognition. ANI can be run on a single computer to perform a single, narrow function supporting one of human skills. However, it is ignorant in all other areas.

By the end of this decade, we may have an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which will reach human level intelligence. Wikipedia defines it as “the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that human beings or other animals can” [1]. But if we want to build AGI we must have a more detailed definition, identifying its key features. Moreover, we would need to know what that ‘intelligent agent’ really means, like what I would propose below:

Artificial General Intelligence is a self-learning intelligence, superior to humans’, solving any task far better than…