OPINION: Artificial General Intelligence Seen to Match, Exceed Human Intelligence

The U.S., China and Russia are among the countries seeking to develop artificial general intelligence, the next phase of AI that could perform human-level tasks and abilities and exceed human intelligence, according to Charles Simon, CEO of technology company FutureAI. Unlike current AI technologies that rely on datasets to execute complex tasks, AGI would exhibit the abilities of the human brain, including common sense, background knowledge, transfer learning, abstraction and causality.

AGI has yet to exist and based on the current studies on the brain or its components, some experts believe the technology is impossible to develop or will take hundreds of years of research before being realized. Other experts, however, predict that AGI can emerge within the next decade, citing computers capable of solving problems related to speech recognition, computer vision and robotics, Simon said in a column posted on C4ISRNet.

While AGI systems are not yet available on the market, there are narrow artificial intelligence systems that exhibit or exceed human abilities in certain areas. Examples of such systems include IBM’s Watson, which can perform calculations the average computer cannot do; self-driving cars, which have the capability to adhere to driving rules and regulations; and Ross Intelligence, a legal expert system that can mine and analyze data from about 1 billion text documents and respond to complicated questions within seconds.

Despite the potential benefits of AGI, many experts do not agree with its development, including theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. In a 2014 interview with the BBC, the scientist warned that the development of full artificial intelligence could lead to the end of the human race.