General Artificial Intelligence and Its Future
Since the rise of AI in the 1950s, the end goal for many researchers was to finally develop general artificial intelligence, an artificial intelligence that would be able to learn, reason, plan, understand natural human language and display common sense, the development of a machine that could think the same way as humans do. But after 70 years of developments and research why is it taking so long?
Over the past 70 years machines have been able to process what language and carry out tasks; has been able to drive autonomously and in 2018 where the Google spin-off Waymo’s self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona hit the roads. There is now doubt that the development of AI has come a long way from its early developments but not as far as researcher thought, in 1990 researcher Doug Lenat predicted:
“No one in 2015 would dream of buying a machine without common sense”
General artificial intelligence seems to stump even the greatest minds with some scientist believing that the development of general artificial intelligence will never happen due to the sheer complexity of it, this is somewhat due to our weak understanding in the general intelligence of ourselves. We have only scratched the surface of a block of steel when it comes to understanding human consciousness and intelligence, so the potential key to having a chance at developing general artificial intelligence is the complete and in depth understanding of how our own intelligence works.
Some researchers believe Deep Learning is the track to go down in order to develop machines that have a similar intelligence to humans, others believe we’ll need a wholly new calculus to create the required “master algorithm,” however one thing everyone can agree on is that we are nowhere near close to the development of general artificial intelligence.
When we reach the development of general artificial intelligence, it leads to a road to the next main goal for researchers super artificial intelligence which will be so much more intelligent than us, although this may be scary to think about as questions like; super artificial intelligence will be so much more intelligent than us that we won't really pose a threat to it, so why would it try to wipe us out?, however that may be a possibility but there are so much more amazing ways that a development towards super artificial intelligence could benefit us by trying to solve some existential problem that humans are presently facing with, like curing cancer or discovering scientific truths.