A beginner’s guide to AI: Human-level machine intelligence Posted on : Nov 17 - 2018

The quest to imbue machines with the spark of life is an ancient one. The golem of Jewish folklore is an early example of an automaton, as well as Pygmalion’s Galatea. But, rather than bring machines to life, we’ve so far only imitated intelligence.

Modern AI, mostly, appears in the form of deep learning. Computer vision, natural language processing, and other machine learning-based technologies have revolutionized the field, seemingly overnight, but it’s hard to cut through the hyperbole and figure out what’s really going on.

You’ll hear and read a lot of different terms being thrown around to describe concepts that seem the same, with few people able to explain the differences. Worse, the experts using these terms often quibble over their definitions.

To clear things up, we need to sort through the nomenclature. The term artificial general intelligence (AGI) is, perhaps, the most popular one for the concept. But there are many others:

• Sentient machines
• Conscious AI (CAI)
• General Artificial Intelligence (GAI)
• Strong AI
• General AI
• Human-level AI
• The Singularity

And there are even terms for machines that are more intelligent than humans: superintelligence and super-intelligent AI (SAI).

If having several terms for the same idea wasn’t difficult enough, there’s no actual consensus anywhere on exactly what any of these terms mean. So, if you’re reading this and getting red in the face over the author’s misuse of a term you clearly know means something different: welcome to the regular conversation.

Some researchers believe AGI — we’ll just go with that term — can be achieved without a machine necessarily being able to do everything a human can (intellectually speaking). Others have a much stricter definition that says all AI is weak unless it can demonstrate consciousness.

And, of course, there’s a distinction between general intelligence and sentience. Many experts are content to think an autonomous contraption that requires no human input to perform a variety of tasks which imitate human-level intelligence (think: a robot that can charge, repair, and upgrade itself but doesn’t feel emotions) clears the bar for AGI, but not for sentience or life. View More