The Technological Singularity

by Murray Shanahan

In short, a human being is a generalist, a jack of all trades. A human chess champion can do a whole lot more than just play chess. Moreover a human being is adaptive. Fixing photocopiers is not an innate capability. It is learned. Had the office worker been born in a different century or a different culture, she would have acquired a different set of skills. And if she has the misfortune to lose her present job, she can re-train for another one. The achievements of AI research in a variety of specialist domains (chess being just one among many success stories) contrast starkly with the field’s failure to produce a machine with general purpose, adaptive intelligence. So how could we produce artificial general intelligence? Before we can speculate in an informed way about machine superintelligence, we need to answer this question.3