Algorithms Are Not Enough

"The holy grail of artificial intelligence research has been the achievement of artificial general intelligence. Since the inception of artificial intelligence, machines that can perform any task that a human might have been predicted to be imminent. Some people have been enthusiastic about this prospect, but others have been terrified. Both have been disappointed. In fact, despite all of the progress in solving individual tasks, this research has not been on a road that could ever lead to general intelligence. To paraphrase the Ancient Greek poet, Archilochus, we have been building hedgehogs, when what we are after is a Fox. The fox, he said, knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Even a stack of hedgehogs, however, cannot duplicate the intelligence of a fox. This book describes a roadmap for designing a generally intelligent fox that solves the problem of general intelligence. It brings to bear wide swaths of cognitive science, including psychology, philosophy, and history to debunk the barriers to general intelligence by identifying the essential features of intelligence that would be needed to achieve general artificial intelligence. Along the way, it makes it apparent that fears of an imminent explosion of uncontrollable computational intelligence (the so-called "singularity,") are completely unfounded"--