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

This chapter explores the concept of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) – its nature, importance, and how best to achieve it. Our theoretical model posits that general intelligence comprises a limited number of distinct, yet highly integrated, foundational functional components. Successful implementation of this model will yield a highly adaptive, general-purpose system that can autonomously acquire an extremely wide range of specific knowledge and skills. Moreover, it will be able to improve its own cognitive ability through self-directed learning. We believe that, given the right design, current hardware/software technology is adequate for engineering practical AGI systems. Our current implementation of a functional prototype is described below. The idea of “general intelligence” is quite controversial; I do not substantially engage this debate here but rather take the existence of such nondomain-specific abilities as a given [14]. It must also be noted that this essay focuses primarily on low-level (i.e., roughly animal level) cognitive ability. Higher-level functionality, while an integral part of our model, is only addressed peripherally. Finally, certain algorithmic details are omitted for reasons of proprietary ownership.