2. General intelligence as the Holy Grail

Abstract

A host of state-of-the-art AI applications exist, designed for countless specific tasks and used in almost every area of life, by laymen and professionals alike. Many outperform even the most expert humans. In that sense, progress has been spectacular. But the AI pioneers were also hoping for systems with general intelligence. ‘General intelligence as the Holy Grail’ explains why artificial general intelligence is still highly elusive despite recent increases in computer power. It considers the general AI strategies in recent research—heuristics, planning, mathematical simplification, and different forms of knowledge representation—and discusses the concepts of the frame problem, agents and distributed cognition, machine learning, and generalist systems.