Although experts disagree over what exactly constitutes intelligence, natural or otherwise, most accept that, sooner or later, computers will achieve what is termed artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the lingo. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Various criteria for intelligence have been proposed (most famously the Turing test) but to date, there is no definition that satisfies everyone. However, there is wide agreement among artificial intelligence researchers that intelligence is required to do the following: reason, represent, plan, learn, and communicate.
Can artificial intelligence display general intelligence?
In 1963, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon proposed that "symbol manipulation" was the essence of both human and machine intelligence. They wrote: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means of general intelligent action." This claim is very strong: it implies both that human thinking is a kind of symbol manipulation (because a symbol system is necessary for intelligence) and that machines can be intelligent (because a symbol system is sufficient for intelligence).Another version of this position was described by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who called it "the psychological assumption": "The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules." The "symbols" that Newell, Simon and Dreyfus discussed were word-like and high level—symbols that directly correspond with objects in the world, such as "dog" and "tail". Most AI programs written between 1956 and 1990 used this kind of symbol. Modern AI, based on statistics and mathematical optimization, does not use the high-level "symbol processing" that Newell and Simon discussed.
These arguments show that human thinking does not consist (solely) of high level symbol manipulation. They do not show that artificial intelligence is impossible, only that more than symbol processing is required. We understand other people and their minds by analogy. Unfortunately, such indirectness is something engineers and cognitive scientists have failed to program in artificial intelligence. This is because the human ability to reliably understand each other indirectly is itself a mystery. Our ability to think abstractly and creatively, in other words, is quite challenging to understand. And it is impossible to code for something we don’t understand. That is why novels and poems written by AI fail to create a coherent plot or are mostly nonsensical. Artificial general intelligence — robot consciousness — might be possible in the distant future. Right now, there are no extant examples of AGI. It exists purely in theory and fiction. While we have artificial intelligences that can do certain things very well, sometimes better than their human counterparts, we don’t have any systems that can think independently in a way that matches human thought.